--- Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
Windows 98 price (in 1997) -> $209 Office 97 Standard (in 1997) -> $689 Windows XP price (now) -> $199. Office 2003 (now) -> $399.
Want to try that again?
Yes... Here's some more accurate data:
Windows 3.1 price $49 Windows 3.1.1 price $99 Windows 95 (Personal) price $59 Windows 98 (Personal) price $99 Windows ME (Home) price $99 Windows NT WS price $99 Windows 2000 Pro price $299 Windows XP Pro Price $399
If you're going to use list prices, use list prices all the way through. The above represent, to the best of my knowledge, M$ retail pricing for the lowest level of their "client" version of their OS available at the time.
You're mistaken. http://www.theosfiles.com/os_windows/ospg_w98.htm http://www.microsoft.com/products/info/product.aspx?view=22&pcid=a9d2c448-eb05-4a2b-a062-9c711c533e0c&type=ovr http://www.theosfiles.com/os_windows/ospg_wxp_pro.htm So it goes from 209 to either 199 or 299 depending on whether you want "home" or "pro." That's hardly an egregious markup for a better OS, several years later.
I confess I haven't followed pricing on M$ Office, but, I'm willing to bet that an apples-to-apples comparison would reveal similar results.
http://www.computerwriter.com/archives/1997/cw230197.htm#prices http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/howtobuy/compare.mspx I was doing a similar apples-to-apples comparison. Look, just accept that not all data points will line up with your assertions - find some others instead. If there are so many, then there have to be better examples than these.
Finally, the price of the client software is actually not the primary problem with M$ monopolistic pricing. It is the back-end software where they really are raising the prices. Compare NT Server to 2K or XP Server or Advanced Server. XP AS is nearly double 2000 AS last time I looked.
Microsoft hardly has a monopoly on servers. If their prices are too high, use something else.
The argument regarding ILECs is reversed. I appreciate the citation of Standard Oil, but it is a fallacy to think that there is a one-to-one mapping between SO and any/all of the ILECs.
True. What is the point?
Standard Oil is a strawman argument. The ILECs are dissimilar in nature and behavior from Standard Oil. An assertion otherwise requires evidence.
Assertions that "monopolies do X and they're bad, and we know that Y will eventually do bad because they're a monopoly" are circular.
Statements like "In the past, monopolies have done X, and, the results of X are bad. Since Y is a monopoly, we can expect them to do X as well, with similar negative results." are not circular. They are attempting to learn from history rather than repeat it.
"History doesn't repeat itself. Historians do." -unknown (to me at least) Don't fight the last war, and especially don't fight it in a way which will impede future innovation.
Since the market is risky to deploy LMI once, you will have a hard time that the market exists to pay for multiple copies of a given LMI in order to support competition.
If there's money in it, then someone will fill the need. I still haven't seen the justification for treating layer-1 last mile differently from layer-2 last-mile, or for that matter layer-3 last mile. Why shouldn't the city just say "everyone hop on our citywide IP network, and then everyone can compete at higher layers of the stack?" David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com