Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Said To Cut Windows Price 70% For Low Cost Devices
kc123 writes with this except from Bloomberg News: "Microsoft is cutting the price of Windows 8.1 by 70 percent for makers of low-cost computers and tablets as they try to fend off cheaper rivals like Google's Chromebooks, people familiar with the program said. Manufacturers will be charged $15 to license Windows 8.1 and preinstall it on devices that retail for less than $250, instead of the usual fee of $50. The discount will apply to any products that meet the price limit, with no restrictions on the size or type of device."
Now all we need is Windows retail to be a more realistic price too.
If they pay me $15, I'll take a copy. Don't want it on any device I own or use though...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
One unwanted side effect I can see coming from this, is that most Windows devices will become either very cheap (to meet the price guideline) or very expensive. If you build a device costing $500, the cheaper devices are not going to be that much lower in spec than you because they didn't have to eat a more expensive Windows license.
When I read this story, I was excited because I thought it meant cheaper Windows for home users. I wouldn't mind running Windows 8 in Parallels on my mac, or even dual boot to it to play games. But the price for consumers is just too high for me to do that. They could get a lot of casual Windows sales and remain relevant but for some reason, they just don't seem interested in doing so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They chased Google with Bing. They've chased Apple with the Zune, their music store, and their Windows Phone. They put the name Windows on everything - their cloud, their phone, their ARM tablet, and their regular PC OS, even though all those products are different. They are a MESS. Good luck to Satya - he will need it.
Microsoft Becoming Desperate to Sell Window 8.1
Microsoft Losing Badly in Tablet Market
Chromebooks Out of Microsoft's Extortionary Reach
Microsoft Discovers Battery Life Is Very Important On Tablets
Microsoft Is Getting "Scroogled"
Microsoft Just Got the Facts
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Just because Apple includes the price in their PC doesn't mean it's free. It is not free if you want to run OS X on a non-Mac PC.
I would love to see Windows on BeagleBone Black. It would show that even cheap devices get the love of Windows and open the Windows store. Also it would look great for kids to experiment with Windows on a $45 computer. At the very least Microsoft could release that micro-kernel version of Windows for hobby/development devices and open up Visual Studio for development.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
It participated in the spectrum auction and made the telcos pay near market rates. It bought dark strands of the fiber network after the market crash to protect itself from local last mile ISPs from holding it for ransom.
It talked to WhatsApp, made an offer of 10 billion with lots of poison pills. It set the floor at 10 billion, leaving all the smaller players aside. It knew Facebook was despo and will buy WhatsApp, but it boosted the price and made Facebook pay dearlym 35% of cash on hand!. Please disregard the 19 billion dollar figure. That is based on overpriced FB stock price. That Facebook will be strapped for money in the coming year for other aquisitions is the key victory for Google.
WhatsApp's 450 million users includes millions who create new accounts every year when their old free for the first year accounts expire. Those users are penny, nay, paisa pinchers who use WhatsApp to avoid international texting charges between India and the Gulf countries and Singapore. They use WhatsApp to broadcast their texts to N recipients paying 1 outgoing text charge. In India incoming calls and texts must be free by law. Only the sender pays. 2 dollar per user? You can't chisel 2 rupees out of them. Anyway WhatsApp has no advantage when it comes to smartphones. Its explosive growth was due to it being the portal to the intenet for dumb phones via SMS. That market is done.
Unorganized linux tried to scare Microsoft with netbooks. Microsoft hit back and evenutally killed the netbooks market, though it had to extend XP's life to do so. But Google resurrected the netbooks markets, and is forcing Microsoft to engage in price war again. Given the drop dead simplicity of the Chromebook, and low cost by eschewing the bells and whistles of the tablet market, it is very difficult to see anyone make any serious money off them. But it hampers the others from raising their profit margins.
Google plays the strategic game stupendously well.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I was surprised that Microsoft was charging $50 per copy to the OEMs. That's quite expensive.
Still comes with a horridly insecure browser integrated into the OS that is incompatible with their previous browsers and enterprise web apps and cannot be removed. Still prohibits preinstall of alternative browsers, search engines. Still prefers Outlook.com sign in. Is still Windows. Seems like they still have a few issues to work through.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As in Beer or Speech?
Considering this is Apple we are talking about, it goes without saying that it's not "free as in speech", doesn't it? Or have they suddenly embraced GPL and I missed it?
It's also not "free as in Beer" either. Otherwise I wouldn't be required to purchase their product first.
So, it's not free at all.
As much as I'm pleased to (for the newer gear) not have to fuck around with innumerable license keys and so on, Apple licensing is actually obnoxiously inflexible, and very consumer oriented. At work, I've become the mac-wrangler-by-default because most of the rest of the department are Microsofties from way back. Fine by me, more variety, more experience, all good. And the desktop and laptop gear is pretty good. Impressive industrial design, not too many freaky issues (though opendirectory is still a pale shadow of ActiveDirectory and Group Policies. Those things can be a byzantine mess; but they sure are powerful).
However, there are some rough edges: You need to buy new gear to replace or expand an existing lab/laptop rollout? Well kid, I'm afraid that Apple's OS support is as follows: The earliest supported OS is whatever the machine shipped with. The last supported OS is the version before the version that has your model in the 'installer will refuse to try' list. Oh, you wanted to expand a lab running OSX version N-1 without upgrading the entire lab to version N? That's so sad, good luck.
Even more vexingly, Apple has largely left the server business (they don't have a single device with redundant PSUs, their 'preferred' OSX Server config is a mac mini with two HDDs); but they steadfastly refuse to simply sell licenses that 'bless' VM instances(not running on physical macs) to run OSX Server. For $1000, they'll ship me their little mini, with its two laptop drives and OSX Server; but they don't even offer a 'keep your shiny little toy and enjoy the higher margins, just let me spin an OSX VM on my institution's preexisting, high-reliability, physically-distributed, high-uptime, SAN-backed, etc, etc. VM infrastructure. We have the cores, we have the RAM (with ECC and stuff, crazy!), we have the SAN, with the fancy disk monitoring and redundancy features. Why won't you take our damn money?
Linux will inherit the Earth. Tremble, M$ Office paperclip.
Not that it's a real problem, Linux is a decent embedded OS(arguably markedly worse than some designed for the purpose at Hardcore Embedded Stuff; but familiarity and smooth scaling from fairly tiny embedded systems to supercomputers counts for a lot); but the 'ChromeOS' is something of a historical irony:
Remember, back in '95, when Marc Andreessen threatened that Netscape would reduce Windows to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers"? That struck MS as plausible enough that they squished Netscape as hard as they could and (slowly) got off their ass on IE development; but look upon ChromeOS, and observe the OS reduced to a set of device drivers by the browser..
Linux will inherit the Earth. Tremble, M$ Office paperclip.
The hilarious thing about this is that there's someone as MS who has decided that the best way to approach the problem of Android/ChromeOS taking their market share is to... compete on price. Because that's going to work isn't it?
They did the same with netbooks. Discounted to $15, then used the $15 price to force the OEM to reduce the specs. Once they got the specs to the point of garbage and sales started to drop off they raised the price a bit, rinse and repeat until the entire market is gone. That's what happened to netbooks, incredibly popular until MS deliberately destroyed the hardware requirements so that no on wanted them anymore. Everyone that bought a netbook and hated it? That was Microsoft ensuring they were underpowered pieces of garbage.
The best tricks are the old tricks.
Cost of ownership is more than the price of the actual software. Microsoft isn't out of the woods yet, but don't kid yourself if you think they don't have the staff, support, and mindshare to roll out something that lots of people want to use.
Google is a very casual operation with regard to the software they provide to consumers. Android is rather fragmented now, and you only see ChromeOS being sold on the lowest-price but also lowest-end hardware on a retailer's shelf. And Google's history of abandoning projects that don't pan out makes many people nervous.
Also, the VM model they've adopted for Android will allow for lots of other vendors to produce VMs to run their Apps. I could forsee Microsoft producing a 'Gaming VM' that allows all the nice little games in Googles App Store to run in sandboxes on Windows.
Free as in beer... Apple has wisely realized that most users care more about the user experience, and having the system meet their needs, then they do about the nebulous freedom RMS says they need to care about more than these the actual, you know, usefulness of their device. Besides, running OSX on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the software's EULA...
Regarding the selling of VM licenses: Apple is primarily a hardware company. Yes, they make software, but that's just to make the hardware work better and look shinier, and thus more appealing to consumers. The fact that you can "only get that software on pricy Apple hardware" is, arguably, the major pillar propping up the sales of their well-made, but outrageously pricy hardware. The "Hackintosh" phenomenon has already demonstrated that, if you're not concerned about slick industrial design (or EULA compliance), it's completely possible to build a working OSX computer for half what Apple charges for similar hardware specs.
Making a version of OSX that would run on VM's would necessarily require the OS to not perform the "Am I being installed on blessed Apple hardware?" check. Setting up a Hackintosh would be trivial, compared to the current level of effort required. Apple likely fears that someone would actually mount a serious (and potentially successful) legal challenge to the "only run it on Apple-branded HW" clause of their EULA. If that clause of the license were invalidated, the Hackintosh floodgates, including "store-bought" variants would be opened, and Apple's Mac sales would be eviscerated. I imagine Apple has decided that ceding the server market to competitors is a small price to pay for the continued sales (and fat margins) on their consumer machines.