That's indeed a very interesting idea, I have been thinking about that a lot lately, but you can't go 100% cloud based, there will always be a need for offline OSes!
Of course, agreed. Many people / enterprises require offline OSes for security reasons, paranoia, confidentiality, a long etc.
But even a cloud hosted service has physical servers that are located in a physical building running some type of OS. I would think that when a cloud OS boots up it has to talk to something to validate itself. A Cloud OS would not put an end to piracy but would definitely provide a much tougher challenge for those interested. Im interested in seeing the long future of the Windows OS. ~MC
Biometrics? Calling "Home" every logon? 1 key tied to bios upon activation? An ED-209? The core OS shipped and built into an encrypted SSD. Installs that only allow for an "online" account profile that adheres to strict licensing? A dongle? A pci card with keys for the right to install Windows. On-demand downloads of the OS only tied to an account? An eeprom. I dunno, what else coul they possibly throw at us?
This will be short and sweet NO anything on the internet is hackable and crackable ask a bank or a large retail business or tec companies
I don't think and even didn't believe Ms think they are smarter, they know very well that the hacking of their (and other) software is simply unavoidable! It thgey would thinking they're smarter than anybody else, they would be down for a long time already!
Lower the price so it becomes less of a chore and more of an impulse purchase. While I know an OS is obviously important, getting one to wrap their head around a piece of software that costs more than a good chunk of components in a PC while not actually being software that is 'used' can be very tricky. Most people buy computers with the mindset of it being like any other appliance. Personally, the only time I buy Windows is during the initial $40ish retail pre-sales, all the way back to Vista. The first real Windows-ish OS I ever bought was OS2 Warp (college - it was super cheap over NT at the time - like $79? vs $199 or something), went to Win 2K once we started getting the MS EDU pricing ($10 or $20 something) and have been upgrading off that ever since. I will never spend more than $50 on an OS. (comp sci.. it was all about (sgi) irix and (pc) slackware, yggsdrasil and redhat)
Microsoft has never been the best or brightest kid on the block, they've just had the most allowance to buy off their betters.
Nothing is 100% secure! Didn't we had some of them in the past already? Remember the the so called Hardware Dongle's of many software developer's incl. Autodesk (AutoCAD) and many others? And where they are today? A few month ago I was draw some of those Dongle's in the bin from Autodesk for AutoCAD 2, from NTI the one for CD Copy Tools, for Thai Font's under Dos 2 and 3.x and Windows 3/3.1/3.11, some accounting apps and a few more! all of them were used via the RS232 Port's! At the time they were still on sale, they already were cracked. Than there was something called Copy Option Board, an internal Card (8 bit), mainly used for to run protected Games! And, and, and! All of that "Solution" were useless at one day after their appearance! And so would be any of the future "Solution" within some period of time!
Microsoft has already solved a very big part of piracy by signing deals with OEM to preload MS OS in laptops and AIO desktop. Tablet and Mobile come with preloaded OS. The only segment which worries Microsoft is the custom desktop builders who are the enthusiastic users. If these users use Windows then they will promote it. The majority of custom desktop builders is corporations which will prefer to buy genuine products and those who do not are sued. Microsoft will keep developing their software to deter privacy but it will also need a change in hardware landscape which is maybe from 10 years from now.
Thanks for the great feedback. I feel stupid for now suggesting a retail key approach. Besides, if that were to be the case, wouldn't it have been begun long ago, say with XP? And if it had, does that mean MDL may never have come to be? (Now I'm scaring myself). And no, I am not a Microsoft (or any) employee. But I am regretting my choice of user name, as Ming_the_Merciless is just a little too close to Bing_the_Merciless !
Piracy of Windows OS, for what! From Win8 onwards, M$ has released GVLKs for most of their Windows SKUs, so anyone can activate and use any version of Windows or even Office for free without any restriction.
I think there are some real smart people within Microsoft, the big question is: Are they motivated enough to spend a lot of time and money on developing a system that is almost perfect and unbreakable (if something like this is possible)? I guess not. I don't think piracy is really that big of a concern for Microsoft at the moment when it comes to Windows. On one hand, there are the enterprise customers, big companies that represent a large piece of the revenue cake and they are white sheep and just buy licenses, on the other hand there are the average consumers that usually get a Windows license every time they buy a new PC, which is kind of a guaranteed basic income for Microsoft. Therefore, I can imagine the group of people left that are most interested in pirated copies cannot be that big, compared to the huge user base of Windows. Therefore, all they do - at least for the moment - is tweaking the existing SPP and forcing people who work on cracks to do a little work from time to time. I'm sure there would be ways to further reduce piracy, maybe not via the technological but the commerical route. Well, just think of a subscription-based Windows licensing model, which I don't think is that far off. The fact that Windows 8.1 already kind of forces you on using a Microsoft Account is a first step in this direction. As soon as such an account is mandatory and tied with license information, it will be very hard to circumvent it. A frankenbuild might solve it, but can also be easily detected and removed once you use Windows Update, for example. How's that going to end? I'm curious...
Seems they did the first step to an affordable system with that new ProfessionalStudent edition, which is introduced with Spring Update .