They need to encourage more people to purchase Windows licenses. OEMs, people with existing hardware, even mac users wanting to run bootcamp. The only way they can do that is to greatly reduce the cost, and get rid of the confusing home/pro/enterprise/ultimate nonsense. No more regular or upgrade versions either. Stop throwing up roadblocks for the user.
Windows 9 (get a new name while you're at it) should ship as a single, unified product with a retail price of no more than $50. All features short of Windows Server included. OEMs will get wholesale pricing, and they can price accordingly for academic site licenses.
Geez these sub-$250 computers will be built so horribly, I mean more so than usual.
I always thought Steve Jobs' statement about not being able to make a $500 computer that wasn't junk was hyperbole, but a $250 machine can't be anything BUT junk. I shudder to think about the $249.95 laptops being flushed through Wal-Mart next Black Friday.
Innovation brings prices up. Competition brings prices down. The balance is always shifting like a pendulum.
I think this is pretty good. Maybe would be stronger concept if you replace the word "prices" with "margin". I don't think most companies care as much about ESP as they do margin. I guess there are some that might, if it's strategic to them, but thats a different thread.
Having two *completely* separate OSes is inefficient, not the way to go. Too much duplication. But having one OS for all devices just results in a non-optimal user experience on all devices.
The correct approach is what Apple did: yes, merge the 2 OSes, but at the source code level, not the GUI level. OS X and iOS share 85% the same codebase. The same kernel, programming language, core classes and dev tools for all Apple products. And they all compile on ARM and Intel. Just the GUI toolkits differ, depending on the device: keyboard/mouse, touchscreen or TV remote.
Microsoft does not need price cuts, they need better products. And that means optimising the software for the hardware it's running on. And that means a similar codebase/architecture approach as Apple. And they should reduce the role of .NET, make it a pure Enterprise app language, sell it to companies but no-one else. Declare the Windows API as their main platform, and C++ as their primary programming language, and modernise everything and bring it up to C++ '11.
Windows will soon become a layer where majority of companies use to run their legacy apps in a virtualized layer on top of any OS in the future. Most apps these days have web based front ends and very portable backends coded on JAVA.
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Still don't see how it's possible for manufacturers to make any money at those levels...
Windows 9 (get a new name while you're at it) should ship as a single, unified product with a retail price of no more than $50. All features short of Windows Server included. OEMs will get wholesale pricing, and they can price accordingly for academic site licenses.
Geez these sub-$250 computers will be built so horribly, I mean more so than usual.
I always thought Steve Jobs' statement about not being able to make a $500 computer that wasn't junk was hyperbole, but a $250 machine can't be anything BUT junk. I shudder to think about the $249.95 laptops being flushed through Wal-Mart next Black Friday.
Innovation brings prices up. Competition brings prices down. The balance is always shifting like a pendulum.
Having two *completely* separate OSes is inefficient, not the way to go. Too much duplication. But having one OS for all devices just results in a non-optimal user experience on all devices.
The correct approach is what Apple did: yes, merge the 2 OSes, but at the source code level, not the GUI level. OS X and iOS share 85% the same codebase. The same kernel, programming language, core classes and dev tools for all Apple products. And they all compile on ARM and Intel. Just the GUI toolkits differ, depending on the device: keyboard/mouse, touchscreen or TV remote.
Microsoft does not need price cuts, they need better products. And that means optimising the software for the hardware it's running on. And that means a similar codebase/architecture approach as Apple. And they should reduce the role of .NET, make it a pure Enterprise app language, sell it to companies but no-one else. Declare the Windows API as their main platform, and C++ as their primary programming language, and modernise everything and bring it up to C++ '11.