While it is trivial for a large corporation to file for a trademark, there are fairly strict guidelines with how they are used (or, more accurately, not-used). Because trademarks can be forever, the law outlines numerous procedures that can classify them as abandoned, which lets Coca Cola be a known, legitimate source of Coca Cola for as long as Coca Cola makes Coca Cola, while preventing businesses from being created that do nothing but license names.
Patents! I'm looking at you!
So the news is that Microsoft filed for the trademark, “Windows 365”. Knowing their trademark on Office 365, people are assuming that this will lead to a subscription version of Windows. The trademark filing is then compared to the statements made by Terry Myerson about Windows as a Service and the free upgrade from Windows 7 and Windows 8.x for a year. You can see where this is headed.
But I have another idea. Perhaps this is intended to lead into their not-yet-disclosed enterprise licensing arrangement for Windows 10 (and related services)? Despite its consumer sound, Office 365 seems to have a fairly large adoption rate with business and education customers. As an example, which is not statistically relevant but is still interesting, the local public school board where I live has licensed a non-commercial, 5-PC license for every staff and student in their organization. This concept has a lot of potential for those customers.
If, of course, they give us a per-device and system builder license option, too.
Makes one wonder just what
Makes one wonder just what “Windows 365” will actually be.
Windows on the cloud? You log into it from anywhere as a remote desktop? Install games to the cloud and stream them to your shield/xbone/windowsphone?
Like microsoft gives a fuck
Like microsoft gives a fuck about games.
“You want games? Go play them on our XBOX!”
Soooooooo, like, umm you’ve
Soooooooo, like, umm you’ve heard of DirectX right? the #1 dominant gaming API? That thing from microsoft, that thing that can ONLY be found on microsoft’s operating system? The whole reason gaming systems use windows at all?
Microsoft cares about market share, that is all. They want every rig Windows, games, work, creation, piracy, work, play, the preacher and the pornographer, the child and the age-ed, the novice and the master, so long as you are using (legal copies of) windows and office, microsoft is happy.
Soooooooo, like, umm you’ve
Soooooooo, like, umm you’ve heard of DirectX right? That thing that Microsoft let dwindle and languish for 10 years while pursuing the Xbox? And now that Windows and DX are threatened by Linux/MacOS/SteamOS/Mantle/OGL, Xbox sales are in the toilet, and Windows 8 is failing, Microsoft is finally giving a sh*t about PC gaming again? … but not really, they just want to integrate PC gaming into the Xbox Cloud.
The only reason there is anything new happening in the Windows gaming scene is due to Microsoft’s ineptitude.
M$ is cashing down windows,
M$ is cashing down windows, it knows that eventually windows market share will only go down, so in order to monetize the wind down, it will gradually switch to a closed ecosystem, a la Apple, style where annual subscriptions, and app store revenues(30% off of the top) will make it money in the consumer market. Steam OS, as well as the Linux share of the non desktop market will not help M$ make new revenues in the OS market, at least, hence the availability of many M$ applications across OS platforms, OSX, android, etc. Its a good thing for the independent games makers, the ones that can not afford the 30% off of the top payments, to M$, or Apple, for that matter, the independents will have OpenGL next, as the mobile gaming market has never depended on DX, or any proprietary graphics, and the mobile and desktop market can continue to benefit from OpenGL, and the other open APIs, OpenGL next and support for Steam OS, will allow the to the metal performance for the open source graphics API based gaming community.
AMD will eventually be forced to offer Mantle on Linux, but that will require AMD becoming independent enough financially to not be dependent on the console revenues, of which M$ hold much influence over AMD, to not port Mantle to Linux, luckily AMD has shared, and contributed to the Khronos group, as well as the entire mobile based devices industry and Linux desktop community, so OpenGL next will have as much Mantle DNA, as DX 12. It should be noted the AMD will be producing a mobile custom ARMv8 based APU in its K12 line for ARM, and for sure there will be Android and Linux(Full distros) using OpenGL graphics APIs. Nvidia uses OpenGL, but to a lesser degree OpenGL only on Linux based platforms.
It’s not like M$ has not stated that they are going cloud based, and the subscription based model goes had in hand with cloud offerings, Office 365, and eventually Windows 365, pay to play. Get ready for 365 days, or your out, if the wallet is not full enough. There will be Linux for those that will not/can not afford the closed ecosystem, provided there are protections in consumer hardware allowing other OSs to be loaded onto consumer device hardware, its time to let you elected officials know, that OS choice on consumer hardware needs to be guaranteed by law, and regulation, because the final steps to monetizing a OS that is becoming irrelevant is locking the hardware to the OS.
So is it unusable on February
So is it unusable on February 29th?
I wonder if they will fix the
I wonder if they will fix the licensing on the System Builder OEM finally? http://www.howtogeek.com/197232/microsoft-is-misleading-consumers-with-windows-8.1-system-builder-licensing/