This will hardly stick in the consumer market, at least outside EU/US. They will lose bundled OEM income and people won't pay the subscription, as it is super easy to put a crack and just give a damn to security. Also there's android phones and boxes, smart TVs, consoles and a lot other things with home and office functionality that can benefit from a windows PC having a higher cost of ownership, can be a bad move.

People that work with it will work around the costs anyway, even apple will hardly lose their pro costumers until they really can't work anymore with their machines, not even paying.

Do Microsoft also plan in becoming a riches only OS?

It looks like it will be all messy and convoluted in the OS front.

They started with doing alternative apps to the android open source apps, moving everything out of the package into a licensed package which told mobile manufacturers what to do. So, I read.

So, end of the year to get a proper open source privacy protecting Linux alternative up? I'm not joking. There are two mainstreams of Linux, and one is a professional version. What is to stop moving whatever from the other stream over to that, put in a compatibility layer for the other stream and for Windows and etc, and let the others wilt. These companies are close to doing their OS's in with this sort of stuff. Spying is not a real living, it's a CRIME. They should be content with offering a non exclusive store, where you can offer hard copies of programs as well as download only. Put me off Mac OS, having to "log in" for updates, and to load in software, allowing for opportunities for information to be sent out. Can't run an air gapped system like that.

Now, let's talk about OS's, they spend far too much money on them, rather then getting them right and leaving them largely alone. These OS's are thousands of times bigger than they need to be because of bloat which seems to be some sort of marketing tool. No need. Let's look at history. A really good small OS was QNX, which had the OS on something like a megabyte floppy disk. Geo works was 1 or 2 size but with a productivity suite and real object orientated OS and task switching back when windows was hopeless (actually it was IBM OS/2 lite but with maneuvering by Microsoft IBM dropped it, and it went solo). So. Tell me you can't put most of what's needed on 10MB with "normalised" coding rather than abnormal "bloatware" coding? The driver pool might be far bigger than the OS, but it can be done.

How many hundreds of millions go down the tube by writing bloated code that needs debugging. If they write it well, they could walk away until the next version of windows with the occasional security update in between, because if they write it well you virtually wouldn't need third party security software, it would be virtually impregnable.

Microsoft is dropping the "Online" branding of its Office Online suite and will refer to the web apps as simply Office. The decision means that the company's products like "Word Online" and "PowerPoint Online" will now simply be "Word" and "PowerPoint." The same goes for the rest of Microsoft's line of Office apps.

Next small step.