Microsoft is trying to make devices that run Windows easier to sell by making significant cuts to the license price.
> Stronger competition from Apple Inc. and Google cut revenue last quarter at Microsoft’s devices and consumer licensing division, which includes Windows software, as the computer industry posted its biggest annual decline on record. By offering incentives for PC makers to sell cheaper models, Microsoft may be able to increase its share of the growing $80 billion tablet market and stave off Chromebooks, notebooks that run Google’s operating system.
This is a slippery slope. Windows is in a race to the bottom and that’s no place for innovation. Time will tell if this strategy will help grow their mobile market share. Personally, I’m skeptical. Make your products more compelling, not cheaper.
The only compelling feature of Windows is the cheapness.
Average selling price (ASP) of a system:
Mac $1300
iPhone $600
iPad $500
Windows $300
Android $150
… so you buy a Windows system because it is cheap. That is the only reason for 90% or more of buyers. Same with Android. The top 10 compelling features of Android are all cheapness.
The Intel Mac took almost the entire high-end (around $1000) of Intel computing within its first couple of years, and the iPad came along a few years later to kick the mid-range (around $500) PC market in the gonads, and then a couple of years later the iPad mini came along at the low-end (around $300) price point which was probably a fatal blow for the PC market. iPad mini delivered the 5-point palm exploding heart technique. That is why you see Windows and Android systems simply getting cheaper and cheaper to try and stay well under the Apple prices.
This Microsoft Windows price cut is just a necessary equalization to account for the PC ASP decline. When a Windows PC cost $800, Microsoft could take $50 and still leave $50 profit left over for the hardware maker. At the $300 price point, the hardware makers are getting $5 profit, if they make a profit at all. That is the race to the bottom. Windows has to cost less simply to make its hardware profitable and encourage the hardware to get better than its current sorry state.
Windows should always have been priced at a percentage of retail price. But it has been $50 since PC’s were $3000 retail, so it used to be considered to be really cheap, but now it is still $50 for a $300 system, so it is the most expensive part used in many PC’s. At $15 for a $250 system, it is still expensive.
plural of PC is PCs, not PC’s which is possessive.
http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/apostrophes_show_plural_of_abbreviations.htm
Also see http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/faqs-on-style/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
The main thing, even from style manuals, is that it is a judgement call give or take a stricture depending on the manual you’re using.
Pesky english.
Pedant mode off. We now return you to your regularly written tech article.
What gets me is, they’re doing for PC makers making garbage sub $250 PCs. Yeah, that’s a great way to get everyone to love your software, put it on junk hardware.
From the New York Times article you cited:
“But do not use apostrophes for plurals of abbreviations without periods, or for plurals formed from figures:TVs, PCs, DVDs; 1990s, 747s, size 7s.”
Apostrophes are appropriate on abbreviations which use periods but not on those that do not. As pedantic as kyron might have been (s)he is correct.
Most people don’t buy Windows for innovation. That’s why Windows XP is still so popular. I predict Windows 7 will still be the most widely used version when MS are trying to push Windows 10 (assuming things last that long in their current form).
For some people, Windows is already doing everything they want, and has been doing since Win XP. And there are an awful lot of those type of people.
I can see Apple making msft do the price drop, but chromebooks? Last count they were less than 0.99% of usage.
Really, do you have to name an OS with those numbers to make a point? I guess Google pay as well as Samsung to writers. LOL.
It’s not the price that’s the problem. They could give it away at this point and they’d still have a declining user base because the market has moved on and they weren’t in tune with that change to be able to ride it.
Nobody wants a desktop OS on a tablet (MSFT proved that 10+ years ago when tablet PCs were a flop) and conversely nobody wants a tablet UI on the desktop. Making Metro the UI for everything was the final straw for a market already discounting MSFT’s relevance. They just hammered the point home.
ChromeOS needs to die and be replaced with Android. Google are the only people in tech who believe that a browser is the only UI you need. They need to stop dropping that bad acid.
I put in two articles and I could have cited further links due to differences in style guides.