It's only available through their volume license scheme. And therefore people will continue to use regular versions and suffer from these issues. Microsoft seems to have forgotten that small businesses (who don't want to deal with volume licenses) run Windows... They get Windows when they buy new computers.
I have small business customers w/ < 10 PCs who use Microsoft volume licensing. I almost always recommend Customers purchase volume license Windows Server to allow the software to be re-assigned to new hardware-- particularly when virtualization is in play.
It's not burdensome or expensive to deal with. (I'm not a reseller, so it affords no advantage for me-- kickbacks, etc. I just like knowing that expensive server software licenses can be moved to new hosts, etc.)
That’s because it’s a product that’s designed for developers to sell alongside the product it empowers. You shouldn’t need to buy a volume license unless you’re building, say, CNC machines. That a product developer sold you a product that needs to be automatically rebooted isn’t really Microsoft’s fault.
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.
