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Comment by peakaboo | Hacker News Reader

You would pay them? Paying Microsoft to not put garbage in your operating system is like paying the mafia to not break your shop windows.

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In some way I see it the same as buying organic food in a premium. First time I learned about people paying extra for organic I thought "but that's how people always used to eat especially if you grew up in a village".

A lot of food is organic, but has to be sold as non-organic because the farm can't pay the licensing/program costs of using the official organic label.

To make the analogy work, all food would be grown organic, but only companies can buy it untampered with. Before selling to consumers producers would infuse the produce with trace amounts of neurotoxin.

Isn't this normal for apps? Spotify has a free version that is ad supported.

Microsoft is giving away Windows. Remember that not that long ago you had to pay €$200+ for an OS.

$139 for Windows Home and $199 for Windows Pro. Where I come from this would not be called giving away.

Official MS pricing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/windows?activetab=pi...

Most people surely buy/bought their license with a new PC from an OEM; OEM's apparently always paid much less, e.g. 50$ (in 2009) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/09/micro... - and less if it was a cheap/low-end device: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-reducing-w...

I'm guessing they're not going to drop those fees, so whatever ad or product-placement revenue comes in is probably on top of that?

Eh, it's the same. The price floor is just different.

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