Microsoft earns so much money on Windows, because they have been able to provide a stable, binary platform. You can take a 20 year old exe file from 1985 and still run on it on Windows today, whereas on Linux, you cannot take a 1 year old executable and run it on the newest version.
The software that we develop in our company, works with Windows 95 and newer computers, using the same executable binaries, and it looks modern to the user.
In other words, the only major changes that Microsoft has added to Windows for 11 years, is more stability and a nicer user interface. There have been some features here and there, but nothing that most users care about, and they're still not even unicode everywhere (like in filenames in compress folders), probably as the only modern desktop OS out there today.
As long as Microsoft does NOT change anything serious in Windows, the costs of using Windows as a platform is small, and they are very competitive. Any change, however, being user interface, APIs, administration etc., adds costs to the buyers and users.
The competition likes change more. Apple and Linux are constantly improving their products, and especially Linux is constantly redesigning how things work, breaking backwards compatibility. Creators of other user interfaces, like Nokia, make even more changes - they are just pushing out new products where each new product can have a totally different software inside.
Every time Microsoft changes something, they're gaining at a cost. The competitors can change a lot without a cost. |
