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No more free Windows... and now it’s all about the services

Microsoft's ‘new business models’ on way

Microsoft won’t give Windows 10 away for free, and plans to charge for new services instead.

That’s according to salesman-in-chief Kevin Turner, who promised new services would roll out in early 2015.

Microsoft's chief operating officer was grilled by one investor at a recent Wall Street conference who wondered whether the giant would “start losing money” on Windows and whether Windows would become a “loss leader". Turner simply said “no”.

Microsoft will keep charging while introducing “new business models".

“That’s not any conversation that we’ve had,” he told a Credit Suisse Technology Conference. “There are services involved. There are additional opportunities for us to bring additional services to the product and do it in a creative way."

Windows 10 is expected to be completed and delivered in the second half of next year.

“And through the course of the summer and spring we’ll be announcing what that business model looks like," added the big sales cheese.

In April, Microsoft began making Windows available at no charge to makers of devices with a screen smaller than nine inches to take on Google's Chromebook.

The company has benefited from a surge in tablets from makers such as Hewlett Packard, all priced around $199.

Firms are able to go so low as they no longer need to recoup the cost of Microsoft’s license fee. Speculation has followed about how far Microsoft would go in the quest for market share.

Also, 2014 saw Microsoft introduce Windows 8.1 with Bing for low-cost devices: it’s a version of Windows only for PC makers that ships with Microsoft’s search engine set as the default in IE.

The company has also been offering tablets with Office, and one-year subscriptions to Office 365.

Turner told the Suisse crowd Microsoft has “more learning and growing do to [so] stay tuned". ®

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