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.

[–] Jiral@lemmy.org 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

License costs for Windows alone for one single Bundesland in Germany are 15 Mio EUR a year, I read, and that doesn't include other costs. France is probably paying Microsoft in the hundreds of millions currently. You can do a lot on your own with that kind of money, especially when using everything open source has to offer, as basis.

[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I'm seems pretty reasonable for a cloud PC.

I just ran the costs through the Azure calculator, and a D2asV6 system with a 100GB drive and licenseing running 16hrs a day, 30 days a month would cost approximately 1200 dollars annually, so 99 bucks a year seems like a steal.

And a D2asV6 is not a lot of compute power. 2 cores, 8Gb ram.

In summary, Azure is fucking expensive if you are keeping VMs online all the time.

[–] timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

Wouldn't you have to include user CALs as well? Im long out of windows land thankfully but I do recall needing those.