>>agrees to fork $120 for MS Office ...., so it comes to $120 per copy.
I meant to say: $360 for MS Office... so it comes to $120 per copy.<<
Alomex -
We all knew what you meant, I'm sure. And you're exactly right. I always knew that I wasn't supposed to put the same copy of, say, WhipItGood version 2001, on my home computer and my laptop, but I'm forced to admit I might have done it. I could have paid for one copy and used it on two machines.
I know people who have never paid for any software in their lives, not that that justifies my violations of licensing agreements (which are completely hypothetical and imaginary, and only for the sake of argument).
The fact is, though, that some licensing agreements do allow a user to put the same copy of a program on both a home and a portable machine, as long as only one is in use at any one time.
I have absolutely no beef with Microsoft taking steps to reduce the incidence of piracy. And of course it's up to them to decide what prices to ask for their products is.
Still, Microsoft has been profitable all along even though by their own estimates, some huge percentage of all the users of their software didn't pay for it. (That would be so much more effective a sentence if I took the time to look up the actual number, huh?)
So it stands to reason that if they would cut the price of Office XP to say, a hundred dollars, but could be assured that 99% of the users would be paying for it, they'd continue to be profitable. Probably more so.
It's not a matter of them being "nice", or that their software development efforts aren't valuable. I think they'd make a lot more money doing it that way.
They could offer a "family plan", where your first copy is $150 bucks, but the second, third, etc., are only $50. They would have to limit the number of copies purchased that way to keep people from hooking up everyone in the neighborhood. But the really good part is that they could make it possible to buy the incremental licenses only over the phone or internet directly from Microsoft, maximizing their profits and allowing them to control the situation.
According to Microsoft employees I've talked to about that idea, the problem is that they have to be able to offer huge discounts to big companies who buy thousands of licenses. Therefore they can't charge some dumb home user less.
Is it really possible that they can't come up with a way to give home users a break? Is it possible that big companies would all stop buying Microsoftware because home users could get close to the same per-copy price?
I'm just not going to pay four or five hundred dollars each for two copies of Office XP, or two hundred bucks for Windows XP. I've bought and installed a copy of Windows XP Professional for one of my home computers, because I need to know about it. But I chafed at the upgrade price of $199, even with a fifty dollar rebate offer. And there's just no way I'm going to buy Office XP. Even the upgrade is just too expensive.
Mr. Gates is still getting some of my money, though, since I did plunk down the cash for Office X.
- Allen |
