Sharon,
I don't know about smaller retailers, but certainly the Warehouses and
CDWs of the world weren't where they are now ten years ago, and they
seem to have no compunction about featuring MS products. When I used
to set up Open Licenses for a Fortune 50 company, the VAR never
complained. Maybe MS is a loss leader for them, too--I guess it's not
impossible--but I suspect it hits small VARs-slash-integrators, as
well as hardware manufacturers, much harder. I personally pass through
all my costs on software to clients when it's absolutely necessary to
pre-buy something, and generally try to avoid any reselling at all,
because I decided it wasn't a viable business model without a huge
client base.
I'm sure your experiences vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and
I respect that. But this is primarily a technical mailing list, not
(sorry about the joke) "All About Money." And the support world would
not have its current presence and job count without Microsoft: fact.
(N.B: I am one who does not consider Apple's downfall to be
Microsoft's fault, so I'm NOT claiming that if everyone were using the
most buggy, feature-bereft, closed hardware/software platform ever
created, we wouldn't have equal work. I just think that someone up
there was merciful and spared us from MacOS.)
Sandy
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