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Microsoft's Masterpiece of FUD?
walterbyrd writes "Linux Journal has published an article by Glyn Moody, about the Microsoft sponsored study: The Economic Impact of Microsoft Windows Vista (pdf). Apparently Moody feels that the economic effects of MS-Vista being delayed in Europe would not be as dire as Microsoft would have the world believe." From the article: "The implication is that the European Commission would be crazy to jeopardize these wonderful benefits by clipping the wings of this digital golden goose, or even grounding it completely. The white paper looks tremendously professional, and is filled with tables, bar and pie charts; it has suitably serious discussions of methodology, and even introduces a few measured caveats: who could doubt its conclusions? What makes this FUD so impressive is that this attention to detail obscures the sleight of hand that is going on here. The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe."
I'm still waiting to hear what is so amazing of Vista over XP SP1?
If I were EU, I would ask "So you have been shipping us crap the entire time or what?"
Really, MS, I can believe it if you said that Vista was an incremental improvement and therefore delay an incremental loss to Europe. It has been mostly incremental improvements since you have been making OSes. You have made three releases that I consider groundbreaking: Windows 3.0->Windows 95->Windows 2K.
And even these delayed wouldn't have cost Europe untold billions of dollars. In fact, in certain respects, it's been downhill for productivity since Win2K.
MS, please don't take us all for idiots.
According to the information in the pdf file the author was someone named 'akotsopoulus'.
a sp?AgencyID=9&city=95&qid=-1
A quick google does turn up someone with that name working for a PR firm called Brodeur Worldwide in Boston. A coincidence?'
http://www.prfirms.org/findafirm/company_details.
Including bar and pie charts labeled "pure flowing bullshit" would still make any phone-flipping corporate hairpiece fuck nod their head and say "it supports our core synergies."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
It is not going to work that way.
Microsoft will make sure that it has agreements with all major computer suppliers to have Vista installed on all newly sold PCs, and make XP available only as a special option (maybe at additional cost).
There will be notices like "Dell recommends Vista!" prominently placed on every product page.
Ordinary consumers will be wary if their new machine will work with XP, especially when it is indicated that this is not guaranteed.
So, even when consumers do not need Vista, they still will buy it. Just as they now buy XP even though alternatives are available.
Yes, because as we all know, it's a perfectly zero sum game. There's the same amount of wealth today that there was 10 million years ago. Nothing new at all has been created. If I'm doing good, someone else must therefore be doing bad, which makes me a bad person.
For starters, money spent on licenses doesn't stay in the EU; it goes back to the US. If it stayed locally, as it often does with smaller EU software shops, then it gets spent on salaries, growing the business etc and gets invested back into the local economy.
Most of it goes back to the US, yes. However, don't forget that MS does employ people in Europe, so some of that money will stay here in salaries. Also software (and the hardware to run it on) is taxable (at least in the UK), so some of the money goes to the government, too.
it could have been more productively spent on hiring people to expand the business and do new things
Chances are, it'll be spent by the training company to expand their business, and for them to do new things.
I'm just playing devil's advocate, to an extent - I don't buy MS's claims either. However, I'm not entirely convinced that things are quite as you describe them either. I agree with the overall point though, that the EU would be better off buying EU-produced software. That's not entirely practical right now, though...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The article is about vista, and that has a projected cost of up to 400 bucks for the enterprise full curb feeler and chrome muffler bearings version from what I have read.
They happen simultaniously:
For customer:
Value of $X dollars: X
Value of Windows Vista: Y
For Microsoft:
Value of unsold copy: 0 (the plastic disc has essentially no value, if were were talking about a car it'd be non-zero)
Value of sold copy: X
Now, assuming Y > X (client actually wants to buy copy):
Before total value was: X (client) + 0 (MS)
Afterwards total value is: Y (client) + X (MS)
What just happened here?
X was wealth movement.
(Y+X)-(X+0) = Y was wealth creation. It shows up as two components (Y-X) for the buyer, and (X-0) for Mircosoft.
In business, you normally call that wealth, with consumers you usually call it utility (because we measure so many other things other than money). What happens when you buy a burger at McDonalds? There's a transfer of wealth, but utility is created - your utility of that meal is greater than the utility of the cash, otherwise you wouldn't have bought it. That is the way pretty much ever non-forced transaction works. Even with things like the broken glass paradox paradox it is the same - you had the choice to leave the glass broken, but the value of having it fixed exceeded the value of leaving it broken.
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