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Will Microsoft Subsidize WinXP For Lindows Buyers?
kinema writes "Ars Technica has an interesting little article about Microsoft's alleged "dumping" of Windows XP. It seems that Microsoft is selling XP through TigerDirect for only US$50 to customers who have purchased a Lindows computer." Note that Tiger says nothing like this on their site (No, you can't buy WinXP for $50 there); Lindows CEO Michael Robertson says (in the linked column) that "Microsoft's latest offers to TigerDirect are extremely lucrative and I wouldn't be surprised if they ultimately cave to Microsoft's pocketbook." PR ploy or reality, you decide.
If you had bought a Lindows system, why would you wanna buy XP. You've obviously made a choice not to buy windows.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
I mean, do we *really* want Lindows to be the thing the masses at large associate with linux, or alternative OSes in general?
Machine9dotNet
Like the friendly neighborhood drug dealer, Bill says, "Here, have this first taste on me..."
People who have bought Lindows PCs are not going to want to spend yet another $50 bux on something that their computer does for them already.
From what I've seen the concept is to eliminate the M$ tax and make the machine as cheap as possible...this kinda defeats the purpose for the user.
I dont know that this is new news,
Microsoft seems to have been taking heat for something or another for as long as I can remember.
On the otherhand, all compitition play dirty. Dont they?
How Now Brown Cow
So, the main competitor to M$ for home-user computer Operating Systems allegdes that M$ is discounting windows XP when specifically targetting Lindows users?
Could be, certainly within the GatesBorgs resources and methodology. Equally however, this could be a cleverly designed ploy to increase the profile of Lindows.
I'll wait on some hard evidence.
Note: I'm not saying I like M$, but I'm certainly not about to go off on some raving Linux-fanboi rant without seeing some evidence first.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
IF and it is a BIG IF, if this is true then what happened to the Anti-Monopoly laws?
Interesting that in all of their supreme intelligence the DOJ and judge thought that their measures would tame the beast.
AND IF and again it is a BIG IF. It it is true. MS should be split right then and there into multiple companies... Sometimes the buck has to stop!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I would think this would be great for Lindows users.
This would make it cheap to make a dual-boot computer! I wouldn't mind having a Lindows computer for some daily work and piddling around. I would setup the dual-booting for games that only run on Windows. I could see paying $50 for it, but not $200...
I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but I am a game fan.
dochood
Why is it that anything Microsoft does is considered bad?
When Microsoft overcharged $200 for WinXP, everyone was criticizing them. Now that they are releasing it for a more reasonable price, they are still getting criticized. We should decide on the price we want. Do you want WinXP at $200 or $50. I would rather have $50.
Besides, is competition not one of the good things GNU/Linux has done to Microsoft? When they had no competition they kept high prices. Now they are reducing prices to compete. Is that not what we want?
Exactly. Tell the customer: "buy Lindows for $50, then buy XP for $50, throw your Lindows into the trash, and notice how you've only paid $100 for your XP rather than $200"! And most users would be curious enough to keep Lindows around (rather than throwing it away), and might have a look at it one boring Sunday afternoon. In conclusion, this looks like an excellent deal for the customer, for Lindows, and for Linux in general!
To all who replied, here's a quick business lesson.
You have the development costs of creating WindowsXP (Cost A)
You have the support cost of maintaining WindowsXP (Cost B)
You have the manufacturing cost of producing a single copy of WindowsXP (Cost C, and let's assume that all fixed maufacturing costs such as the buildings and machines are included in the fixed development cost)
If MS sells n copies of XP, their costs are A + B + ( n * C ).
So if they sell 100 copies, it's A + B + 100*C
If they sell 10000 copies, it's A + B + 10000*C
A and B are already factored in. They know they have to pay for those no matter how many copies they can sell and they must price WindowsXP with some margin over C, and not worry about A or B.
If they can sell many copies of WindowsXP for a large margin over C, then they'll recover A and B very quickly. If the margin is small, it will take longer to recover those costs.
Microsoft estimates how many copies they can sell at various prices and chooses the price that allows them to recover A and B the fastest.
With a relatively small variable cost, it's almost impossible for Microsoft to "dump" their prices in the traditional definition of the word, which is temporarily selling below your variable cost to eliminate competition.
In the Lindows case, they're just reacting to market pressure.
That's what pays their developers' salaries.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
The only surprise here is that Microsoft is acknowledging how overpriced Windows is. I loaded OpenOffice on my son's computer for his homework last night. For the average user with light word processing needs, Redmond's bloatware much too expensive as well.
rather than dumping. IANAL, but I thought most countries had laws that are supposed to prevent the kind of practice alleged here: offering substantial incentives only to a specific competitors customers in an attempt to drive that competitor out of business.
And, for the record, the command line is not arcane. I know of no other easy way, for example, to go into a directory full of MP3s, Oggs, and WAVs, and move only the Oggs to another folder. In DOS, it would be something like this:
cd \music\downloads ..\ogg
move *.ogg
In Explorer, it would involve hunting through and finding all the Vorbis files, and then Ctrl+clicking each one, and then cutting them, and then going up a level, and then pasting them in the ogg folder. As another example of the command line's usefulness, can you imagine pinging a site with a GUI? That would be retarded.
Jesus Chr*st that is NOT captialism. MS being an monopoly CANNOT sell it's products for $1 each in order to keep competitors from entering its market. That is illegal plain and simple.
Your vision of what captialism is is whacked. The worst thing that can happen in a capitialist market is one company gaining complete control. Sorry but being a strong advocate of capitialism myself I see this as among the worst things any company could do to maintain a monopoly.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You'd lose the case, because about $50 is what MS charges companies like Dell per copy when they buy in bulk. Their lawyers would say that this is the fair value, and the rest is markup for the retail distribution system. Pretty high markup, but hardly unprecedented.
In any case, if Microsoft can be accused of dumping for charging $50 for their software, couldn't a case be made against Red Hat for providing free ISO downloads? Isn't that dumping? It costs more than $0 to provide that service, so they are clearly dumping it.