Indeed, although there's a huge amount of the economy built upon small businesses building things and selling them to other small businesses, neither of which wants to deal with a subscription-based volume license deal.
The factory I know using CNC machines bought them many moons ago, for a fixed payment (the old fashioned way), from a small business. They don't have any kind of subscription, they are fully offline, and they won't go anywhere near any kind of network. I don't really see recent Microsoft product lines delivering what's required in these scenarios.
Arguably this is more of a use-case for Windows Embedded, but that has its own licensing challenges. Ultimately the small system integrators will end up shipping with Ubuntu if Microsoft makes it too hard to build products around the
Windows ecosystem, as it will save them time, money, effort and support costs.
The factory I know using CNC machines bought them many moons ago, for a fixed payment (the old fashioned way), from a small business. They don't have any kind of subscription, they are fully offline, and they won't go anywhere near any kind of network. I don't really see recent Microsoft product lines delivering what's required in these scenarios.
Arguably this is more of a use-case for Windows Embedded, but that has its own licensing challenges. Ultimately the small system integrators will end up shipping with Ubuntu if Microsoft makes it too hard to build products around the Windows ecosystem, as it will save them time, money, effort and support costs.