Response to Snow Leopard Cost

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What do think Microsoft's pricing scheme and advertising campaign will be now due to Snow Leopards insanely low cost of $29?

 

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Apples and Oranges - they'll keep it priced the same.

Qs

 

They are both operating systems.

The only difference is Apple also make hardware to run the OS where as Microsoft do not.

Given the huge economies of scale and the virtual monopoly MS have I'd have thought they could release an OS upgrade every other year for £40 and still make a very healthy profit.

 

And apples and oranges are both fruit.

Could they? Yes.
Will they? No.

Qs

 

The 'apples to oranges' argument is normally used to suggest meaningful comparsion cannot be made.

My remark was to point out that as two consumer OS's why can't a comparison be made ?

 

It all depends on how you look at it.

Microsoft and Apple OS's are generally geared toward different sections of the consumer market, and therefore have a completely different target audience. Just because Apple is dropping the price of their product, doesn't mean Microsoft have to do anything at all.

In my opinion, they'll keep pricing the same.

Qs

 

Sure an aston martin costs more than a ford, trouble is which one is Windows ?

 

The $29 version (which will come out as £29 as they always just swap the currency symbol) is an upgrade only package for current users of Leopard. If you are on Tiger and running a intel based mac you will still have to pay the full whack for the complete package.

I can't say that snow leopard has me particularly excited, though for the price of the upgrade I will very likely pick it up.

As for M$, they will go their own sweet way same as they always do.

 

What Qs said really ...

 

Microsoft won't lower the price of their new OS any more than they would start charging $29 for major service packs.

 

ROTFL good call


No, MS won't lower the price
Snow Leopard is nothing more than an SP for Leopard
lets wait for whatever they call the next one (Liger?)


Apple OS IS cheaper than the MS equiv, but then, MS only make margin on the OS, Apple make margin on the hardware (huge margin actually), most the software, hell the music you buy through itunes apple gets a cut of!

I've said it before, if Windows was 500 quid I'd still buy it every time a new one came out
seriously, 500 quid to power my primary working environment for 3 years? based on the fact my computer is active 24/7 even if I am not thats 26280 hours in 3 years

tell me a car you could get that will hold up to that many running hours and use less than 500 quid of fuel with free replacement parts during the 3 years and the next 5?

sounds like Windows is pretty cheap in the scheme of things

 

Are you nuts ?

To manufacture a car part some guy in boliva has to use dynamite and a pick axe to get some ore, then that ore gets processed into a base metal, then that metal gets shipped to a factory, then said factory presses part, plus various other parts also get assembled, then it gets QA checked, boxed, shipped, put on a shelf by a retailer, plus sales tax yadda yadda yadaa.

Oil, same deal, someone has to prospect for it, someone has to drill a well, then it has to be pumped out of the ground, then it has to be refined in a huge refinery, then it has to be shipped in a tanker (ship), then it gets put in a storage depot, stuck in a a tanker (truck) and taken to a petrol station, then 60-70% tax gets stuck on top.

These items are made of scarce commodities and involve massive amounts of per unit labour, manufacturing and research.

The cost to create an OS is largely fixed, divide this fixed cost by a large market and over many years and the costs depreciate to virtually nothing. The current windows kernel is 90% the same as the NT 4 kernel. There is virtually no additional cost. There are no consumable parts, your OS requires relatively low maintenance. It certainly should not cost you by the hour.

If a new microsoft OS is worth £500 why do they do deals for OEM versions for £30 ?

How do you think other OS vendors have managed to give their OS away for free or virtually free for the last 40 years ? Ok so they sold hardware but their markets were tiny by comparison to the MS Windows market. Theres probably many mainframe and minicomputer OS's that had nowhere near as big a markup when taken by volume as windows server licenses .

20+ years of MS marketing must have frazzled your brain !

I'm gonna invent the MS digital watch, you can pay me for upgrades every 2 years, say a cent a minute seem reasonable ? After all digital watches have great uptime !

 

I think your missing the point
I don't give a rats how much it costs to produce (and your neglecting the fact that MS hire (and pay for) some of the smartest people on the planet, not really the kind that get hired to make car parts in Bolivia for near criminal wages

you would be better off perhaps comparing the OS to the design process of a new car, lots of work and effort goes into it, but once its designed and finalized, your just cookie cutting the damn thing 1000 times a month (sure, there are component costs, but I digress)

the POINT is, even at 500 quid, its value to me is greater, so its a good price
people are quick to try and compare this new 'information' age economy and say how tripe it is that we pay for what effectively is free replication, they fail to look at the underlying value proposition

Windows Vista was valuable to me, I paid for Ultimate
Windows 7 will be no less valuable to me, I will pay for it

Should the pricing differential be so broad? (+300 quid for Ultimate, 0 quid for OEM copies of Home premium or whatever) perhaps not, but that's the business model that MS have chosen

You compare the cost of other OS systems, have you paid for AIX or HP-UX recently?
OSX and Windows are the two most refined OS platforms on the planet, Apple keep the costs down but lock you into hardware, MS keep the costs high and let you do what the hell you want with it, the decision does not ultimatly come down to price for me, nor the majority of my clients

Edit: BTW, I have a MAC, and Leopard, and I will buy Snow Leopard
I also have many windows systems, all of which will be upgraded to 7
One thing MS could learn from Apple is.. FAMILY PACKS! come on MS, people have multiple systems these days, don't charge for every instance, I can only use one PC at a time! (well most people can ;)

 

What you do with your money is your business.

Just don't create fake economic arguments about the value proposition.

Many places employ Phd level staff at low rates, colleges and schools to name a few. I agree they should get more.

I also think thrid world labour should get better working conditions, my point is if you cannot attribute the true value to things how can you make things better ?

If the consumer won't buy fairtrade but will pay £500 for their OS it does the world no favours.

Making a car is not cookie cutting in the sense of pressing a DVD. The supply chain for a car involves hundreds of companies and thousands of parts. I shudder to think of the true environmental and economic cost of just one part for its entire lifecycle. Refining metals often involve chemicals such as arsenic and cyanide. Many industrial processes have many stages and involve very hazoudous materials.

 

Phd level staff does not mean 'best in the world' your confusing academic accomplishment with talent (and believe me, most Phds don't have any)

and fairtrade is all well and good, but its limited availability hardly makes it compelling for the majority of consumers and products (I buy most my fruit and veg via a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) meaning its all grown locally and delivered to me every week during the growing season)

at the same time I have no problems purchasing items made in the third world, I actually know a few folks who run businesses that use cheap foreign labor, and whilst we sit on our high horses in the west, most of the folks working for them are happy to have jobs, happy to have a steady income (sure, i'm not talking pure sweat shops here, the ones that keep kids working for 16h a day without breaks, but even well paid foreign labor is cheap and horrendous by our standards in the west)

Global ecomonics is not really the subject of this poll though
MS will not lower the price of their OS, and why should they?
the Windows OS is worth every penny to us westerners

 

Creating, sure. Then there's all the support and fixing and patching and additions to functionality and whatnot that will go on for the next few years. THAT cost is NOT fixed... and, like Ryan, I believe that is what makes the Microsoft OS worth the cost.

Just because it's worth that much to Ryan doesn't mean Microsoft should charge £500 for it...

Apple makes up for it in hardware. Microsoft makes up for it in volume, particularly with OEMs. And, as such, they're giving away their OS for free or virtually free. My wife paid a whopping $420 for a blazing-fast, high-quality, name-brand laptop... at that price, the OS is basically bundled in for little-to-nothing.

Most of those that aren't priced higher (and there ARE plenty of those, I can promise you!) typically make their profit through hardware as well.

But... we don't pay Microsoft for upgrades every two years. That's the point of this entire thread. I'm still getting Windows XP updates for free 8 years after it was released.

 

Mike hit the nail for me
Just because I would pay 500 quid
does not mean they should charge that, and thats why I, for the most part, agree with the versioning (although sometimes I wonder how they decide what features end up in what version, no bitlocker2go outside of ent/ultimate? gheeey)

 

The problem is the target audience of the laptop hunter advertisements are not going to realize how cheap Microsoft still is in the grand scheme of things when they see a whopping $29 for Mac's OS and Windows for $80-$200+. You better believe the average user won't realize snow leopard is just a SP that Windows users would get for free.

 

Not exactly true, I mean Windows 7 is mostly just a repackaging of Vista with SP 3 included.