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by chc 4950 days ago
I don't think cash flow is Microsoft's overriding concern at the moment. They'll still get plenty of steady income from their corporate cash cows. Right now, I think Microsoft is more worried about the existential threat of a world where people are weaned off Windows. They want Windows 8 to be used in as many places as humanly possible. If they can maintain their ubiquity, their overall ecosystem is secure. They will gladly trade a little profit from the consumer OS market to stay entrenched.
1 comments
guygurari 4950 days ago
If that were true, then I would have also expected them to ease up on the anti-piracy measures.
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kyriakos 4949 days ago
They did. By lowering the price. I used to have 2 PC's running pirated copies of windows. Not anymore, they are both running Windows 8 I purchased at a reasonable price of 39.99.
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guygurari 4949 days ago
As far as I know that is an upgrade price, which you can only get if you already own a legitimate copy of a previous version.
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kyriakos 4948 days ago
I do have Windows Vista OEM licenses which give me the right to upgrade to 8, just no windows 7 licenses which i used to run 'illegally'.

But I believe Microsoft knows what they are doing, cause the upgrade assistance does not check if you are running a legit version. It either means they were too trusting that users will be running legit versions before upgrading or it means that they deliberately left this hole in order to get a revenue from users who would otherwise just install a pirated version of their new OS.

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chc 4948 days ago
The non-upgrade price is lower too unless I badly misremember how much Windows 7 went for.
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chc 4950 days ago
It seems to be really hard for any big company to be "OK" with piracy, even if that company wants to get its software in as many hands as possible. They simply crave control. This is even somewhat reasonable, as pirate versions may be unreliable in ways that the official version isn't, thus giving a bad impression of your software. They would rather just sell the official version dirt cheap.
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illuminate 4949 days ago
"I would have also expected them to ease up on the anti-piracy measures"

Are there any specific anti-piracy measures you're referring to, or just the presence of them?

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