[Wolves] Re: MS tightens the screw

Peter Evans zen8486 at zen.co.uk
Fri Apr 7 12:38:17 BST 2006


On Friday 07 April 2006 10:07, Stuart Langridge wrote:
> More to the point, that's not really what MS say. What they say is
> "You can resell Windows, and you get to buy it for OEM prices; if you
> start selling Linux machines then you have to pay retail price for
> Windows."
Just as you can choose not to purchase something a vendor has the right to 
refuse to sell you a product.  That's true of any product and any vendor as 
far as I know.

With that said the fact that if you choose to supply competing products from 
two vendors means that one of those two vendors then changes the way they 
choose to deal with you is perhaps predictable.  If the two products were 
equal I'd expect there to be a scheme where the re-seller gets an increasing 
benefit from selling one flavour of product that the other.  That's the basis 
of competitive pricing I believe.

Now how does that work if the competitive product is free?  In the commercial 
market I would then be looking at the competing support offerings - and this 
is confusing enough for the people that deal with it full time in Enterprises 
so god help the SME market.  For the domestic market it's not relevant - who 
out there buys a home desktop with any o/s support over what the machine 
vendor supplies?

To the enthusiast there's actually a benefit to buying a non-OEM license in 
that it's yours to put on whatever you like (one at a time of course :)), 
with the OEM it's tied to the rig that you bought it with.  Quick aside - did 
they ever figure out when an OEM license becomes invalidated: when you change 
the CPU or hard drive or any combination thereof?

Do I like the fact that a supplier is treating people like that - no I don't, 
but I can't see them behaving any differently.  That is until the 
applications that run on these machines are so platform independent that the 
choice of o/s becomes a reality.  We're not there yet and I think we may not 
be for some time.  Because lets face it as important as an o/s is it's not 
what the computer is used for.

To be clear - I'm not consciously acting like a Troll, or cause an argument.

Recently I'm increasingly concerned by the concept that *any* non-appliance 
device (i.e. the generic PC) can be considered suitable as a general purpose 
domestic product.
-- 
Regards,

Pete Evans



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