I don’t see a problem with this business model. They’re doing work maintaining software they don’t want to maintain, so charging for it makes sense. It’s surprising to me that Windows doesn’t already charge a yearly subscription fee for OS upgrades.
Many people aren’t going to pay the annual fee and will keep using Windows 10 without the security patches anyhow, so obviously this will weaken a lot of people’s security, but, well… Microsoft needs to make money. And it’s not like they need to worry about their customers defecting to another operating system. You can’t just download and install macOS on an old Dell machine. If they’re going to buy a new computer, it makes sense to get a less expensive one than what Apple’s offering, ergo they’ll get a new Windows 11 computer.
And if they wanted to and could use Linux…well, they’d already be using it. Overall, I’m completely nonplussed about this announcement. If you weren’t going to pay Microsoft money, nothing has changed. If you need a longer support period, you now have an easy option. And hey, there’s always the chance Microsoft will backtrack and provide free updates anyway. Especially given the lack of details on pricing, it seems like they’re sounding out the idea rather than fully committed to deploying it.