Probably also saving 100 to 200 million euros more in servicing fees. Licenses are but one component of cost models these days for companies. Sure, they will still have to find a vendor to service their Linux systems, but there should be a lot more cost flexibility in that space.

Windows 365 is the "cloud PC" that Microsoft is hosting as a VM in Azure. So you have a thin client that only connects to the VM over the internet. It's very niche and pretty expensive. Regular windows licenses, especially with their volume of licensing will be a lot less. But they still save millions on licenses, especially for the M365 office licenses that they now no longer need.

That might be the MSRP, but it's not what they were paying.

They're going to have at minimum three different types of "discounts" applied to their price:

• Volume discount
• Government discount
• Tenure discount

If I had to guess, it would knock anywhere from 30% to 60% off MSRP.

The current cost for what they’re calling “windows 365” is $99/yr per user.

Windows 365 Enterprise basic starts $31 per user per month and goes up from there.

I suspect you are confusing Windows 365 with Microsoft 365. The former includes a virtual (Cloud) PC and licensing for Windows and Office, the latter only provides Office licensing. Additionally the price point you quoted makes me think you are looking at Personal / Home pricing because Commercial & Government Office 365 pricing is calculated per user / per month and will vary wildly in price from $10 pu/pm to $50+ pu/pm.

And if they put something like 10% of those savings back into developing more open source tech it would be a huge boost to the global community.

It’s not like they don’t need staff to support windows.