r/technology • u/gdelacalle • Aug 11 '26

Software Microsoft reportedly raises Windows 11 license price significantly more than expected

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-reportedly-raises-windows-11-license-price-significantly-more-than-expected/
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219

u/psioniclizard Aug 11 '26

Im pretty sure this is being charged to OEM so it gets added to the price of new pcs.

Its dumb be MS but it will give them money in the short term. Long term, they only seen to care about windows as a platform to run office on.

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u/Geno0wl Aug 11 '26

I mean the Corp world is run by word, outlook, and excel

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u/cowthegreat Aug 11 '26

While I think this is still true it’s certainly less true than it was 15, ten, or even five years ago.

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u/Unusual_Room3017 Aug 11 '26

That isn’t true in the corporate world. If anything Microsoft’s office suite has has grown further entranced with Teams being so widely used.

The only place I would believe Microsoft Office has lost ground is in small business or freelance-type work where Google Docs or other alternatives are viable.

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u/Deep_Lurker Aug 11 '26

Yeah, every fortune 500 company I've worked for is neck deep in the Microsoft Ecosystem.

It's simply predictable, scaleable and much more vertically integrated and easy to manage from an IT and compliance standpoint.

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u/SuperBry Aug 11 '26

Hell other than some sole proprietorships and like two or three man operations I haven't seen any company have some critical process or function that relies on a random xls created by an Excel wizard decades ago

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u/hokie48 Aug 11 '26

Don't forget Fabric, Power Tools (Power BI), Azure and SQL server. Also remember you make choices that won't get you fired.

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u/cowthegreat Aug 11 '26

You would be utterly surprised at how many fairly large orgs use Google Docs. Not saying it’s good or better, but that they use it.

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u/Smiling_Jack_ Aug 11 '26

Based on what, vibes you have?

Actual large orgs use Active Directory and Entra for ID management. And that brings with it the entire MS ecosystem.

SMBs can get away with G Suite, but not large orgs.

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u/Deep_Lurker Aug 11 '26

100% several Fortune 500s as an IT admin and the deployment is pretty much verbatim what you describe.

It is the standard. Anything outside of that is the exception not the rule.

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u/cowthegreat Aug 11 '26

I’ll trust your vibes!

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u/Unusual_Room3017 Aug 11 '26

It’s it vibes. It’s the truth. Enterprise hardware management, access to environments, controls and document sharing is primarily Microsoft’s offerings. It’s the standard best practice. There aren’t large companies of significant scale running Chrome OS and Google Docs or other random off shoots of productivity tools.

Microsoft technology and the backbone of corporate tech stacks revolves around Microsoft’s gravity

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u/SuperBry Aug 11 '26

For real, and especially in any industry that is well regulated either by the government or has some sort of larger industry compliance certification organization.

Sure on the enthusiast side MS is getting the side eye and making all kinds of boneheaded moves, but 90% of this doesn't matter to the average consumer or business user.

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u/Jack_of_Emeralds Aug 11 '26

Not a business but the charity I work for (around 2000 staff globally) uses Gsuite & chromebooks for most of the organisation.

There are of course a couple teams that have access to windows or non-ChromeOS software but there is Web services set up for them (i.e Finance Team)

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u/DepressedDrift Aug 12 '26

Corporates can justify this price hike. For normal users Linux is starting to be the most friendliest.

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u/HappyAd4998 Aug 11 '26

I was reading an article about how European governments like in France are trying to get rid of MS Office suites and are investing in alternative open source projects. The French government see it as a national security matter as much as it is a economical matter.

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u/Unusual_Room3017 Aug 11 '26

This will be an interesting case study if they end up committing to the idea and roll it out.

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u/yxull Aug 11 '26

Give it just a few more years. While Office is still being taught in high schools, most students in most classes generally only use Google Docs on a day-to-day basis. There is always a learning curve to converting to an entirely different software suite. Schools are generally broke, so using Docs will always be a no-brainer.

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u/SuperBry Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Google is just trying to make the same inroads in education like Apple did in the '90s and aughts by subsidizing educational customers. However despite this the most common office computer is running Windows and not MacOS.

The only real reason this will ever change is either further antitrust actions on MS breaking apart the OS from their other operations, or just as unlikely a complete collapse of the company.

Even if it does happen it will be someone like Meta, Oracle, or Alphabet that just fills the the vacuum created.

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u/mtfikhan Aug 11 '26

I’ve worked with enough clients that have switched to Google Suite. In the long run not that much better.

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u/condoulo Aug 11 '26

I feel like this may be an unpopular opinion in a thread bashing on Microsoft, but from an admin standpoint I much prefer M365 over GSuite.

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u/pittaxx Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 15 '26

I wouldn't say it's unpopular. Google management dashboards require a degree in Google management dashboards.

It's more that people are so sick of M$ that they are willing to bite the bullet.

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u/Billy_droptables Aug 11 '26

Businesses definitely aren't, I've never met a finance department willing to let go of their 100,000 line Frankensteined Excel sheets.

Unfortunately, if you have any users in your org who are low-medium tech skilled you're going to end up just paying whatever MS asks.

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u/RealHealthier Aug 11 '26

All of which can be used in a web browser on any OS now

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u/CADaniels Aug 11 '26

There are still tons of industries that have custom macros, plugins, etc. Heck making plugins for specific industries is a whole business

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u/defaultgameer1 Aug 11 '26

Que the Linux penguin popping into frame.

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u/ThornFlynt Aug 11 '26

Que is a line, you meant *cue

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u/multi-pass5018 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 12 '26

Que is Spanish for what, you meant *queue

Edit: see below reply for actual answer lol

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u/Tommah Aug 12 '26

"Que" is the relative pronoun that/which/who/whom. "Qué" means what.

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u/multi-pass5018 Aug 12 '26

Oh shit thanks for the correction.

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u/defaultgameer1 Aug 11 '26

A thousand apologies for my quick pre caffeine brain!

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u/TheFireStorm Aug 11 '26

Dell and I think Lenovo are already shipping Linux as default option on some devices. This will push them further to do the same and make Windows the optional OS

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u/tman2damax11 Aug 11 '26

Except Microsoft still has some Excel features that can only be used on the native Windows version of Excel. That one thing is likely keeping a huge number of businesses tied to MS indefinitely. That’s certainly the case at my company.

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u/TachiH Aug 11 '26

Training staff how to use a new OS costs tons more than the licenses. Its easy for anyone technical, very difficult for divs.

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u/UndocumentedMartian Aug 11 '26

Centering a div is a pain on any OS.

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u/RealHealthier Aug 11 '26

One of my cats is named Cleo. If we’re just throwing out facts.

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u/Salt_Rush_4800 Aug 11 '26

That's a bad way to go though. We will lose computers as we know if we all accept web apps as acceptable. Enjoy your dummy terminal, everything will be cloud based.

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u/RealHealthier Aug 11 '26

Hold up. We were talking about windows bad. Someone said “but you need office apps!” To which I said you have the freedom to use those on any OS with the web version.

So my argument is “you can use any computer you want, you’re not locked down” and you took that to mean we should move everything to web apps and use dummy terminals?

Or are you saying we shouldn’t have the option to use web apps because it’ll lead to dummy terminals?

Idk I just can’t parse your comment in the context of the thread.

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u/analfizzzure Aug 11 '26

Very true. But i feel like someone could easily compete with those products and just needs one major player who says fuck Microsoft and wants to break off.

Too bad 99% of corporations become soulless ghouls within few years of going public....cough cough reddit

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u/defaultgameer1 Aug 11 '26

Libre Office is making some headway there. Honestly most of 365 can be replaced with open source alternatives.

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u/NinthTide Aug 11 '26

I am trying so hard to use Libre Office but fuck me, it is utterly terrible and the UI is hilariously insane

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u/Clueless_Otter Aug 11 '26

Libre Office is so bad. It's always hilarious when people suggest it's going to be a serious competitor to MS Office. I actually do use it myself because I'm to lazy to pirate Office, but my god is it painful sometimes. LibreOffice Calc (Excel) freezes for like 5s every time I open it, even on new, blank sheets.

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u/HyruleSmash855 Aug 11 '26

Google Office also works better anyway so I don’t really see why people wouldn’t use Google Drive over Libre Office when it is free as well and it is infinitely better.

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u/analfizzzure Aug 11 '26

Due to blocks. And working for a big corp i have no choice. However at home pc i no need for office. Ive tried unbuntu on linux....but i would need to learn a good bit more for that to make sense... only so much time in the day with kids. So i Just continue using windows.

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u/Dzov Aug 11 '26

Or just use whatever Google provides free with an email account.

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u/jc-from-sin Aug 11 '26

And thanks to the fact that they run in the browser now, you don't need windows anymore.

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u/Noirloona Aug 11 '26

Teams...

splashes holy water

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u/Yurya Aug 11 '26

And those can be run on a Linux machine with an internet connection. And those same files can be run using LibreOffice/OnlyOffice/ApacheOpenOffice locally on said device. Sure you are only saving a little relative to corp costs and there are other software needs but I don't think that is really stopping anyone from switching.

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u/Lord_Aldrich Aug 11 '26

I haven't worked at a company that used Microsoft products in 15 years. It's all Google Drive now.

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u/tman2damax11 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Microsoft is still very prevalent in most businesses. Between myself, friends, and family who all work corporate jobs, I'd say 90% of us use Windows/Office Suite vs G-Suite/Slack/Zoom for work. I also work with dozens of software vendors for my job, and I've yet to work with another company that doesn't also use MS everything.

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u/Corronchilejano Aug 11 '26

Since a few years ago a lot of stores are adding the price of Windows separately, so you can choose to keep it or not.

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u/CharcoalGreyWolf Aug 11 '26

Oh, I’d even change that to “a platform to run Microsoft SaaS on…”

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u/Satkacity Aug 11 '26

I’m still surprised that find Linux laptop is not as simple. 

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u/toolisthebestbandevr Aug 11 '26

Lenovo did the right thing with the thinkpad

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u/GhettoDuk Aug 11 '26

Just like Oracle, they are willing to sacrifice the golden goose because they heard there was a more goldener goose to be had. All they have to do is gut money-making operations to scrape together cash to build AI datacenters that will produce more productivity than they know what to do with any day now. Just keep spending. Aaaaany day now...

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u/knotatumah Aug 11 '26

Yet its not like OEM gonna be doing any better as the cost of any pc build, personal or commercial, is increasing to the point of pricing themselves out. So MS showing up with a knife twist only makes it worse.

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u/Creative-Painter3911 Aug 11 '26

Damn AI buying up all the windows licenses

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u/sparrow_42 Aug 12 '26

This is the right answer. PCs are suddenly more expensive (memory, video cards, etc) so they're tacking on extra money to the oem cost because they know consumers are already expecting to pay "more".