Would You Pay $1000 For Windows?

markbark writes: "Stan J. Liebowitz, a prof at the U of Texas Management School, has released a screed saying that the world economy could take a $300 billion dollar bite in the ass if Microsoft is broken up. Tales of $2000 computers with Windows costing an additional $1000. The whole 39-page PDF file can be found here . The whole thing was bankrolled by M$ apologists extraordinaire the Association for Competitive Technology and should be taken with an extremely large grain of salt." (More below.)

If you're interested in the anti-breakup point of view, even as devil's advocate, this is a useful place to start. I don't buy all of Liebowitz's assumptions or conclusions, but it's much more informative than most flamewars, and does bring up some nagging ideas about market behavior and legal remedies.

I found interesting, too, his assertion that "[a]t the current time, there appear to be virtually no major desktop applications that have been ported to Linux, including those from such market leaders as Intuit, Symantec, Lotus, Adobe, or Quark." Fewer than I'd like, certainly, but "virtually none" is hard to buy.

It's not unreasonable to suggest that the price of Windows would rise if it was made by a newly-formed separate division of Microsoft, but if the marketplace is truly dynamic, it seems like that change could as well be in the opposite direction. (How much would Liebowitz have predicted Netscape's browser to cost today, given the information available in 1993?)

And for some devil's advocacy the other direction, you might find this Motley Fool article (suggested by sjbe and others) an interesting take on an MS breakup as well.

Comments

Symantec's irrelevant to Linux

[Frater 219]

Symantec & Lotus: They already sold out, or have been crushed by Microsoft. Much more worrisome.

Of course Symantec wouldn't port their products to Linux. Most of Symantec's products would be completely unnecessary under Linux. Symantec's products page presently lists 17 software products, of which three serve solely to fix Windows or MacOS design flaws, eight serve purposes already well-served by existing free software, and two serve political purposes not in tune with many or most users of Linux-based OSes. I count only three as potential Linux-based products.

The following Symantec products serve to correct or work around design flaws of Windows/DOS or MacOS:

• Norton AntiVirus -- While viruses running under Linux have been created as experiments, the Linux platform does not suffer from the promiscuous vulnerability to machine-code viruses of unprotected platforms. Nor do Linux's popular applications suffer from unprotected scripting systems vulnerable to viruses.
• Norton CleanSweep -- Almost all Linux-based OSes use package-management systems such as dpkg and rpm, which permit the clean uninstallation of programs.
• Norton Speed Disk -- ext2fs, the current standard filesystem for Linux, does not suffer from the severe fragmentation problems of FAT, nor from the somewhat lesser but noticeable ones of FAT's successors and MacOS's HFS.

The following Symantec products serve purposes already filled by existing free software:

• Mail Gear -- The foremost mail daemons for Linux (such as sendmail, postfix, and qmail) already support the filtration of mail. Users can use procmail recipes or other tools to accomplish the task at their level.
• Norton Ghost -- Virtually every Linux-based OS ships with backup/recovery and disk-imaging tools such as dump, tar, and dd. There are even X-based versions such as guiTAR available.
• Norton Internet Security (firewall portion) -- Firewall capability is built into the Linux kernel. Several popular free packages exist to do rule-based intrusion detection, such as snort.
• Norton Utilities -- Though ext2fs is more robust than FAT or HFS, it can suffer from disk hosement in certain situations (such as loss of power); in these cases, Linux already has fsck. (Norton Utilities also contains tools that belong in the previous category, such as software to prevent program crashes from bringing down the whole OS.)
• pcAnywhere -- Linux has ssh and X for secure remote login and display.
• Procomm Plus -- The last thing Linux needs is another terminal emulator.
• Retriever -- Port-scanning software is hardly anything new to Unix; for network security mapping try SATAN or one of its derivatives such as SAINT.
• WinFax PRO -- The Hylafax system supports the sending and receiving of faxes under Linux (and other Unices) as well as network-based faxing.

The following Symantec products serve political purposes not in tune with many or most Linux users; specifically, they are parental or office censorware:

• I-Gear
• Norton Internet Security (censorware portion)

(The functionality of censorware may be duplicated with free software, so these could perhaps be put in the previous category; however, due to the general opinion of censorware as Bad And Wrong [i.e. unethical on principle and furthermore broken in its implementations] among the Linux community, they belong in their own category.)

The following Symantec products are potentially useful under a Linux-based OS:

• Expert -- From the blurb, this sounds like an attempt at implementing Bruce Schneier's model of analyzing security as a business risk. (I am not convinced that Schneier is right, nor do I claim that Symantec Expert is a good implementation of his ideas ... but that's another story.)
• Mobile Essentials -- While one could well keep several versions of /etc in tarballs and untar the right one for each location, I imagine laptop users would like a clean way to switch from one set of settings to another.
• TalkWorks PRO -- The last time I looked into the matter, there didn't seem to be any reasonably advanced voice-mail or answering-machine packages for Linux.

(Mobile WinFax is not counted as it runs on the PalmOS, not a conventional OS. Norton SystemWorks is not counted because it is a bundle of several packages listed above.)

In short, it is not to be taken as a surprise that Symantec, and other "utility software" companies, see themselves as not having anything to offer the Linux community -- they don't.

Paying only $1000?

[citizenc]

If you are a user who obtains Windows software by legal means, (such as from a store.. there has to be at least one or two of you left) odds are fairly good that you have paid almost that much already.

See, Microsoft is a 'lets-make-money-forget-the-customers' company -- they charge for everything, including every piddly little upgrade for Windows. (The Windows 98 -> SE upgrade is almost $90 from EggHead.com .. but all it did was fix bugs.)

Windows 95 Upgrade (From 3.11) - $125
Windows 98 Upgrade (From 95) - $125
Windows 98 SE Upgrade (From 98) - $125

The FULL versions of these pieces of software are at least twice as much. (At least here in Canada.. granted, our currency is worth slightly more then a pile of donkey shit.)

Oddly enough, Microsoft sent me a copy of Milennium for free. (I beta tested it for them.) Guess where it is now?

(Answer to rethorical question: on my coffee table, making sure that wet glasses don't leave moisture rings!)


------------
CitizenC

Well it's already up to $380.66 last I looked...

[sheldon]

I just took a look at ebay, and someone is apparently willing to pay at least $380.66 for Windows.

Someone selling Windows 1.0 on Ebay

Say the word Microsoft, watch IQs plummet

[Dreamweaver]

Jeeze.. i think MS is just as dirty as the next guy, but why is it that when someone says "Microsoft" on slashdot the apparent intelligence of the posters drops to about 7?

All up and down the thread i see "Ha! Do that and nobody will buy it!"
--okay, pay attention now, this is the important bit--
That's The Freaking Point!

The whole idea here is that breaking up MS is a bad idea because it would drive the price of MS products up, causing fewer people to buy them, hurting the tech market by alienating customers. Now, before you say, "Huh uh! They'll just use Linux!" remember Grandma May and Steve The Jock whos idea of bleeding edge technology is AOL on their iMac.

Linux isn't for everyone. Now, before you flame me to north dakota and back, i like linux. I'm using linux right now. But linux can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. Yes, you can install redhat 7 in 5 minutes without knowing much about your computer, but do you really think that Grandma wants to learn the directory structure, or that Joe will be awed by the power of the command line? No.. they want to plug the computer in (with as few wires as is possible), turn it on, and have a bright and cheery GUI with nice big buttons staring back at them.

Much as i hate it, idiots are the majority in the modern world. When you think about things like the effects of an MS breakup on the market, you have to remember that the reason MS has a monopoly is that there are enough idiots out there to have put them there.
Dreamweaver