Sorry, Ed, maybe I was misreading your original statement,
LOL. Microsoft is charging for its browser because Windows aint free.
which seemed to be in line with old statements from, I think, CFO Maffei about how the economics of IE worked. It was part of Windows, and as such, Windows revenue was properly the base income against which IE development was charged. Or maybe you're still making that argument, I can't quite tell. Regardless, given:
What don't you understand here? Browser development is being paid for
by non-server Windows operating system upgrades, new purchases of PC's pre-installed with Windows, and now Office upgrades and other tools since the Explorer component is now becoming a mandatory requirement in order for them to work.
Hobgoblin man says this doesn't seem to be saying quite the same thing. I still don't quite see how Mac and Unix IE users are paying for their browsers. Maybe it really is "free forever". Maybe it's paid for by straight-out cross subsidy, stringing those other lame OS's along until the Windows monopoly is absolute. That's a different issue. Or do you mean something else?
As for Linux, the commercial "freeware" model is that you pay for support, which many think is most of the cost of software anyway. Near as I can tell, it's supposed to be most of the cost of running Windows too, at least in large scale deployment. The TCO studies also talk about the small scale costs of legions of Windows users kibitzing around trying to figure out what's going on.
As to being saved by Unix admins, well, when your OS doesn't crash much in the first place, the number of times you need to be saved tends to be somewhat lower too. In my years of running Unix, disasters like needing a disk reformat because the OS totally hosed itself were rare indeed, it seems a commonplace occurrence in Windows World. I hear that the road warriors were among the hardest hit by the "seamless upgrade" to Windows 98, the OS that was supposed to suck less. That story's sort of faded now, though.
Cheers, Dan. |
