>>>hese manufacturers have the very worst OEM pricing from Microsoft
Any reseller can buy Win98 in quantity 3 for less than $60 (via the DSP program), which is about 3.7% of his component cost.
<<<
OK, my local store has PCs for 700 bucks. So let's say roundly 60 bucks, and component cost of maybe 600 bucks ($100 profit). That makes Windows 10% of the component cost. And actually, they even have some PCs for less than that. Compare it as part of the retail price, and that is $99 out of 700 or less. That's around 15% on some models.
>>> NT pricing has not changed much since its introduction, and in some channels has gone down.
Excuse me. I have been buying NT since it's inception. As everyone should know, most shops use NT Server if they use NT workstation, unless they just use it as a standalone PC OS. And since the price for that can be thousands, we are talking a big increase. If I wasn't getting grandfathered in I couldn't buy it anymore.
>>> And NTW was never intended to be a PC OS,
4 years of MSFT pronouncements about 'Cairo' and other miracles of a unified product line, and the design summary book 'Inside NT', 1st edition, from Microsoft Press, say you are wrong. By now DOS based Windows was supposed to be dead. Their actual plans have changed, of course, due to the need to create market segments.
>>> it was designed for the workstation market where OS prices are considerably higher,
Please. It's a PC product. Limited disk, limited memory, limited processors. Gad, Linux is a far better workstation product - and it's the low end price, not NT. All they have done is create a range of pricing options - a product line. In point of fact NT server is the exact product that NTW is, with a single switch thrown to make it boot differently. And Win32 API is Win32 API, although the foundation for Win95 is still DOS, and the drivers and many internals are different. But the application programmers usually don't care which is which. There are some other versions than the Intel ones. No big whoop yet there, few people care.
And MSFT has in many cases seemingly made it less capable in many ways. For instance, the less capable RAS in 3.5 compared to 3.1. Ditto for total number of NTW users, IP sessions, ISDN connects, ... They exposed the kernel, counter to original designs, by changing the device drivers in 4.0, making it more of a shakey product crash and security-wise than the 3.1 original had been. This is not what you do when you are trying to compete with SGI and Sun in the workstation space.
A lot of people at the high end did get forced or tempted into NT. For instance, by making the C++ compiler so it wouldn't run on win95 or Win31, so you had to buy NT to make programs for win95 at first. Giving it away 'free' on developer disks (the first ones free ;-) But that has to do with MSFT marketing plans, and has nothing to do with actual OS technical characteristics. Create a higher end market, needed or not, corral some rich users, characterize the OS in marketing speak as being for that group, apply the thumbscrews and make them bleed. Simple.
Take off the logo screens, and the average user wouldn't even be aware that they were running excel or whatever on a different OS.
>>>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%.
I am in exactly the opposite camp - I think that you have it backwards.
MSFT will have to drop prices from CURRENT levels or they will start to lose OEM
business.
>>>
Not so fast, my friend. Notice I carefully said 'the sort term". Yes, in the long term MSFT is going to lose OS share, if they lose this case in a way that really restricts their power. Lots of people in the biz are making plans already to make a switch if they can. But the reality of that is that it will take a few years to achieve really damaging momentum. You need apps for those other platforms, and that takes some time, except for special markets like web servers, where all the customers are techs and everyone needs about the same software (DB, web server, OS.)
Also, the characteristics of the alternatives are enough different from MSFT that users will have to decide on other factors than price most of the time. The fact that IBM had competitors did little for many years to keep them from reaming the customers who were locked into mainframes. Matter of fact, it was government action, for instance in forcing them to let amdahl have the OS, that created what competition there eventually was.
It is way too early to tell how the pricing of Windows will work out when all this is done. Even if they have competitors thriving on giving the OS away and charging you for documentation and service a la Linux.
Cheers,
Chaz |
