To: Alan Buckley who wrote (14191 ) 11/18/1997 4:29:00 AM From: Keith Hankin Read Replies (1) | Respond to
I don't see where I contradicted myself. The two statements I made are actually quite consistent. It seems that you don't understand the history of the economics of computer systems. It has to do with several issues, particularly having to do with the markets at which the OSes were originally targeted, and it also has to do with volume. The reason that UNIX software is much more expensive is the same reason that mainframe software is much more expensive than UNIX software. UNIX software vendors cannot sell their software at PC prices because they cannot sell in the volumes that they can with PC software. UNIX systems were designed for engineering, usually sold with hardware that, because of the requirements needed to handle demanding jobs and because it never generated as much in the way of volume, was inherently more expensive. Thus fewer units were sold. MSFT did not bring about the economies of scale by bringing better products out, but by creating a monopoly. The rest was self-creating.
