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Windows 7 may harken back to the days of Windows 95, when you could choose what applications you wanted to install with Windows. But with a twist, as charging users different amounts for the various modules will be more widespread, and it opens up the possibilities of adding subscription based software modules as well, such as anti-virus.

When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most "modular" yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS.

Link: Evidence mounting: Windows 7 going modular, subscription