Yes, prices are way too high.  I manage a network at a small company and we don't get much for breaks on the prices.  And the ones I do I have to search out.  With Microsoft and Adobe charging such high prices I'm almost feeling the open source and free software route is the best.  and App103, you are so right about the need for money being evil.  I can't believe how much prices just seem to keep going up.  I think much of the problem is corporate greed.  The corporations (notice I did not mention people) are trying their best to take over.  In some ways it seems it's time for "we the people" to fight back, and I guess one of the best ways is running free software and giving up on software from Microsoft, Adobe, etc...  Yes, you have some very good points.  Thanks for this interesting topic.

Leland

To this day, Microsoft encourages piracy of its products. The more users the merrier. Why? The only reason you'd want piracy is lock-in. Lock-in grows the user base and is achieved by none other than proprietary formats. If I can't see the code, then I'm helpless to myself and to others, and soon, a victim of things like WGA and hyper-expensive upgrades. There is no real name for the philosophy of "because we can." That's part of the reason for the success of the biggest software companies, Adobe, Microsoft, Autocad, heck, even SAS. Its very vagueness makes it hard to attack. In actuality, it is not a single entity. It is made up of three main parts.

(1) Corporatism, which is based on the belief that whatever makes money is good — and should never be restrained;

(2) Autocracy, which is the belief in unlimited monopoly. Around the globe, many nations do not bow to Microsoft like we do, nor do they want Microsoft's software. But that doesn't stop Microsoft from wanting its software on every computer, even if they sell Vista for $800 in Denmark and $3 to developing nations;

(3) Open Source/FOSS people are dangerous idiots. And between lobbying, lawsuits, and self-sustaining relationship between helping large corporations make huge profits in return for campaign contributions and support for DMCA, DRM, Patent law, and other policies designed to suffocate and frustrate competitors play a role in the — for lack of a kinder term — Fuck-the-user business strategy (because they can). Open Source software is the biggest threat, period, because it levels the playing field for interoperability and competition. (God forbid we have either of those!)

Sad but true, i used star office, which is provided free to students at the university i go to, for a semester but i then went back to M$ office just because of a few little things in the formatting and so on that had taken me an age to figure out in word and i couldnt get to work in star, though i'm pretty sure the functionality was there i just couldnt work it  and also the documents produced by the teaching types there are all in some form of office document, word or powerpoint.  years of using word at work had paid off for microsoft, and then sending resumes and so on out, everyone uses word.  beaten by the numbers

So, in an attempt to revive this thread. What does everyone think of the new subscription based windows services that are coming with Windows 7? You pay for the base OS and then addon what you want as far as additional small features.

My thoughts on this are NSFW or children! I am not a big fan of Apple, but their pricing scheme for OS X is the "way forward" in my opinion. Of course, I may be proven wrong, but I figure that all the proposed scheme for Win 7 is going to do is make getting the full featured version more expensive. I'd rather, and would gladly, pay $100 - $150 as a flat fee for the complete, full featured operating system than pay, say, $75 for a gutted version and then per feature on top of that. Unless they keep the cost of the add-on features low, it's going to be prohibitively expensive to get all of them... I'm buying an operating system, not ordering a handbuilt car.

Personally, I don't have a great issue with it, as long as they charge a sensible price for the OS, and a small fee to activate some major features, like as I mentioned the other day, Media Center, or controlling Windows with the voice (as long as it's clearly something people with accessibility problems is not using).

Perhaps something like BitLocker as well, or Internet Explorer maybe. Nobody will miss that one . Essentially, big features of the OS used by a certain niche of the market, and for which free alternatives exist.