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To: rudedog who wrote (21877)	12/2/1998 2:29:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

>>> I think that Boulton is way off base with his pricing analysis - it depends on a very narrow definition of the desktop OS and ignores the realities of the current marketplace. <<< I differ with some of these figures. In my local biweekly PC shopping guides, Computer Currents and Micro Times, all the prices of the small local manufacturers of PCs are listed. These are the most numerous manufactures, employ per PC produced the most employees, sell PCs at the lowest cost to the consumer, and in my experience, have the best personal service and the greatest compatibility: the clone shops. These are manufacturers the government should have strong interest in preserving. These are the shops that broke the $2000 barrier and then the $1000 barrier for full-featured PC prices. Across the country, there are tens of thousands of such shops, selling hundreds of thousands of PCs a week. The top of page offerings of these shops now always include at least one PC under $1000, including monitor, and often several, from 6 hundred something to 9 hundred something. 1. These manufacturers have the very worst OEM pricing from Microsoft. 2. One can't act as though we were just talking about Windows and DOS here. We are also talking about NT. The price of which has risen dramatically, and already is over 20% of the cost of such a PC. 3. To get full functionality in the Windows OS from Microsoft, you must buy add-on packs. This raises the price to the consumer considerably for those who buy this. 4. Worst, you are using the wholesale figure for Windows OEM pricing to the biggest manufacturers and mixing it with the retail price of the high end PC. If you are going to make this comparison at all, and I don't think you should, you should at least compare that OEM price to Dell's other costs of parts in manufacturing that PC - probably under $1000, or compare retail to retail. I actually think the idea that MSFT would have a 30% drop in usage if they raised prices, over the short term, to be pretty silly. People would just have to pay the extra 30%. Period. Nobody else is selling something you can run Word and Excel on. And the retail customer can't handle Linux. Nor can the corporations switch to Macs in any great numbers. Any effect would take (is taking, I should say) years. This is as the MSFT longs here told us all through June of this year: the famous MSFT 'death grip' on the market which they were so happy about. In the short term they were quite correct about that, and I don't know where they have disappeared to now that this pricing power seems to be a problem. Sal? Reg? Death Grip? ;-) Cheers, Chaz