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The Secret Origin of Windows
harrymcc writes "Windows has been so dominant for so long that it's easy to forget Windows 1.0 was vaporware, mocked both outside and inside of Microsoft — and that its immediate successors were considered stopgaps until OS/2 was everywhere. Tandy Trower, the product manager who finally got Windows 1.0 out the door a quarter century ago, has written a memoir of the experience. (He thought being assigned the much-maligned project was Microsoft's fiendish way of trying to get rid of him.) The story involves such still-significant figures as Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, and Nathan Myhrvold; Trower left Microsoft only in November of 2009 after 28 years with the company."
That video was made in what, 1985? And Windows sold for $99 according to the ad.
Today, Windows 7 (NOT AN UPGRADE) goes for $178.54 on Amazon and lists for $199. According to the Minneapolis Fed, $99 in 1985 is worth $200.21 in 2010 - in other Words, inflation adjusted, Microsoft hasn't raised the price of Windows. And if you include all of the programs that are included with Windows 7 that you would normally have had to have purchased separately back in '85 (compression, file management, image viewers, etc, etc...) Windows has gone down dramatically. Now, they've been labeled a monopoly in court, but they're pricing isn't that of a monopolist. Actually, they've given the consumer a really nice value.
Now, cue the MS haters who are going to accuse me of being an "apologist" and for being a "revisionist". Whatever. I just think it's an interesting micro economic case study.
BTW, get a life.
Economists until very recently denied that the factor called "lock-in" even existed. Yes, a bunch of old stuffies insisting that what they say is the way the world works even when they miss some big pieces. I wish I could find the quote which showed that attitude however Google is now polluted so much with the phrase "lock-in" that it's all noise searching for when it wasn't that way. Left field: My operating system is Free, if everyone saw that obvious value and weren't tied to existing applications and data they'd all jump ship immediately and by doing so would also immediately raise my operating system's quality of code to amazing levels: just because of the weight of bug reports and new blood of code.
Shh.
to be REALLY fair, windows 7's market is bigger than Windows 1.0's was.1985 = 30 million PCs, 2007 = 1 billion PCs . Since costs are fairly fixed (dev accounts for a lot, DVD+packaging for almost nothing), we could expect the price to be $200 x 30 / 1,000 = $6, assuming stable dev costs, which they obviously weren't quite... but that raw calculation is no dumber than yours... actually may be a bit smarter .
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I think people mainly think of as % of a complete PC. PC then? $3-5000? Windows $99. Do the maths... Now, PC=£400 (dunno in $). Windows=$200... NOW do the maths...