I hate this article because of the title. I clicked this honestly because I was expecting to learn something outrageous about the pricing, but Microsoft hasn’t even announced it yet, just that it’s not going to be free. The journalist here could have just wrote in the title that it’s going to cost money, and left it at that. If they wanted to do a real good job, within the article they could even share what the Windows 7 version of the program cost people to help give a sense for what we should expect. But they didn’t even do that.
Anyway, here’s the latest information from Microsoft:
“Security as a Service”
At that point, the OS will be 10 years old, and was a free upgrade for anyone running Windows 7 or later. It’s plausible to not have paid a cent for your OS for 15+ years by 2025.
If you’ve bought a new computer with Windows since 2021, you’ll have v11 anyway and won’t be affected.
Frankly I have to hand it to Microsoft - they’ve been generous with OS support. The pessimist/pragmatist part of me puts it down to upgrading old OS’s to combat their reputation as being the cause of worms/viruses going mental on the Internet over the past decade or so. So it isn’t like they haven’t had ulterior motives.
But yeah, I can’t really fault them for this one.
