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Why Microsoft Shouldn't Worry About Cannibalizing Their Userbases
New submitter coyote_oww writes "A ComputerWorld analysis article suggests that Microsoft should stop worrying about one product cutting into another product's sales, and concentrate on putting their best foot foward regardless of the impact on product lines. The big impact would be the price of Windows: '... Microsoft must, at least in the main, sell devices based on lower prices. And the only significant component of a Windows-powered device that can be cut further — hardware margins are at or very near the bone, and have been for years — is the Windows license.' It's still possible they could sell Windows versions at different rates for different devices, but that could get hard to justify to consumers over the long haul."
Release windows for free, and we will finally see how it competes.
You know what I want? A lower-cost Windows targeted at gamers. I don't need drivers for scanners, printers, fax and other unnecessary crap if all I do is play games on it.
A Windows with less processes running would also mean a faster computer able to dedicate more resources to the games instead of crap I don't need.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
from the article: "As part of the reorganization, Microsoft will consolidate all of its client OSes, including Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows Phone 8, Windows Embedded and Xbox, into a single engineering group [...] The Windows desktop client and mobile have a lot of common functionality, and a combined group could have a lot of synergy".
I fully agree, that's a good strategy (and it was about time)... oh, and one o the few times the word "synergy" makes sense!
The important thing to remember is in a competitive economy, someone is going to disrupt your business. It might as well be you. Fighting against it only postpones the inevitable.
Windows is a product. When you buy it pre-installed on a machine, prices are already cut to the bone with volume discounts to the manufacturer. Someone has to pay for the security updates, the patches, and so on when it's run by a monolithic corporation instead of an open source community.
I've no beef with the price I paid for my Win7 laptop -- and I know that maybe $50-100 of that purchase price was for the Windows license. Perfectly reasonable.
I use Ubuntu LTS on my "main" machine, but that's because I like Linux, not because Windows is "too expensive."
Furthermore, precisely what product line would be cannibalized by cutting Windows prices further? WinPhone (which no one wants and is a different code base)? WinRT (which no one wants because it's a piece of incompatible crap)? XBox (which doesn't even have an installable OS)?
This article is essentially flamebait to spark discussion, and nothing more. There is nothing pragmatic or realistic about it.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Cannibalize your own product line before the competition does is an obvious necessity, yet it is the hardest thing for managers to actually do.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The article talks as though Microsoft is a monolithic entity that will like a single intent. Like any large organization there it is a conglomeration of parts and they mostly act in their self interest than the interest of the whole organization. Most of the time there is a large overlap between the self interest and interest of the larger body. But Microsoft has some perverse incentives like giving part of the revenue stream from a product line as compensation to the top managers of that line. Sounds great in theory as a motivation factor but it can backfire too. These people in top management well versed in the palace intrigues have to let some other part cannibalize their revenue stream for the interest of the organization as a whole. The track record is they won't. Only when the "partner level" managers' bonuses (or is it bonii?) are tied to the over all performance of the company, not the individual parts under their control, they will let internal cannibalization. But letting their bonii depend on large parts of the company they have no control over is a tough sell too. It is a problem that developed over a long time. It won't be solved in short time.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
WGA stopped the wholesale OEM piracy from the organized crime shops. They were even producing holograms, shiny boxes, "certificates of authenticity" etc. Palates of this counterfeit software would be shipped through quasi-legit channels into serious software retailers for realistic prices.
Casual piracy of Windows doesn't affect MS. Your PC probably shipped with the OS anyway. The high volume of XP licenses out there are businesses who were hoping for something better than Win7 before XP began to disappear. Few people are running machines old enough to have shipped with original XP licenses. Who wants a 256MB of RAM, 20GB HDD machine from 2002 anyway?
MS is dying because Ballmer is an f-ing idiot.