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No More Fair-Price Refund For Declining XP EULA
mark0 writes "Getting a fair-price refund from Amazon or Asus after declining the Windows XP EULA appears to be a thing of the past. In contrast to reports from the US and the UK from earlier in the year, Amazon simply refuses and provides information to contact Microsoft. Asus is offering US$6. Despite being confronted with publicly available information about the real OEM price of Windows XP Home Edition being $US25-US$30, Asus replies, 'The refund price for the decline of the EULA is correct in it being US$6. This price unfortunately is not negotiable. I do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please be assured that it is not ASUS intentions to steer you away in any which way.'"
You can't buy a car and then take out the engine and demand a refund on the engine, so why should you be able to buy a computer and not use the software and demand a refund on that?
I can think of three responses:
Tying is an unlawful monopolistic behavior.
The engine is an integral part of the car. The OS is just a set of instructions that the computer executes.
Do you know that you can't refund the engine?
$ make available
The product in this case is a PC with windows installed.
Product tying is explicitly and specifically one of the monopolist trade practices that Microsoft agreed in a consent decree with the US FTC to disengage from performing in the early-mid-90s, and contravention of this consent decree and Microsoft's continued constraint upon its OEM partners to continue product tying was among the monopolist actions that caused Microsoft to be judged as a criminal monopoly in the United States v Microsoft, and to further be judged an abusive monopoly by the European Commission and the European Communities' Court Of First Instance.
Da Blog
Sounds illegal ... oh wait this is the united states we're talking about. The scammer's paradise.