Microsoft suspends free trials for Windows 365 after a day due to 'significant demand' A free two-month trial for Windows 365, a virtual PC running Windows 10 on Microsoft's Azure cloud, has been withdrawn after only a day having "reached capacity." A note on the Windows 365 product page states: "Following significant demand, we have reached capacity for Windows 365 trials," and offers a signup to be notified …
>Why would people suddenly flock to them now?
Because the non-cloudy products are getting worse.
Teams regularly hogging 100% CPU on a decently specced machine? Ah well, lots of people have been complaining for a year but apparently this is not really a priority for MS to fix. Or MS is not capable of fixing it.
Probably MS forgot, with 1.5 billion users, a million is a small number of users (less than 0.07%), but that is a lot of capacity to provision and have available.
Which does raise the question does MS seriously believe that the majority of the 1.5Bn Windows users will move to Windows 365?
Yup, beat me to it. This isn't something you pay off after a year, this pays off after 2 months. Maybe faster if you pay per GB on upload.
In many cases whatever cheapo computer is being used as a thin client is going to outperform the thing it's connecting to.
The reasons you might want this go along the lines of security and ease of mobility, say your sales droid is going to China and needs a trusted computer or your developer is working with sensitive data and everything needs to be in a controlled environment and audited. Moving everyday computing to these instances makes no sense at all.
It makes sense for their Office service, O365. The "O" indicates octal base, which is 245 in decimal (representing the 245 days per year of operation you are promised).
"W" is apparently some newfangled base notation I didn't learn in school.
Er, I am in a location. It is "where I am". My location is not something that can be "assigned", randomly or not. You can't pass this tripe off as a feature, it should be one of the more basic features to correctly set the user location. Doesn't inspire confidence in anything more advanced if they can't get this simple thing right.
When I heard Microsoft announce that Windows 10 would be the last Windows OS, it came to mind that they might move to a fully cloud model. After all, they make far more out of cloud services than OS sales. Well clearly they are not quite ready for it since they are releasing Windows 11.
But like it or not, I think it's the future, a web browser page replaces your desktop.
I'm keeping my tech and my storage, even if I have to buy enough kit to last me the rest of my life.
The computer revolution empowered individual users by giving them their own kit. Don't let them 'take back control'.
The subscription model is a con. It works for business as they can sack some of their tech staff and give everyone a terminal instead of a computer. But as a user you lose more. It is the difference between owning a house and renting one. Rent and your landlord has a key to your door.
Chromebook or cloudOS, they are all iterations of the old terminal model. To quote Nancy Reagan, 'just say no'.
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