On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Mike Gill <[email protected]> wrote: > The problem is, there IS NO KEY. If I build a computer to get the key I must > buy XP along with Win7/Vista whether it’s the $30 discounted version of full > price. It must be bought. I typically think of rights as “free”.
When Microsoft uses the word "free", what they really mean is they've found some other way to get you to pay for it. (They're not different from any other company in this respect. Ain't nothing free.) > Really they could provide an ISO ... Cost of hosting servers, bandwidth. > ... email a key like they already do on other products. Cost of order processing to get that key. Could Microsoft could roll those costs into the purchase price of the product? Sure. And there is prolly even enough margin on Windows, and proportionally small enough demand for this, that it would be a tiny blip on the P/L sheet. But Microsoft (like most companies) has the explict goal of not only making money, but making as much money as possible. They charge whatever the market can bear. And thanks to their monopoly status, the market can bear quite a bit. > I just think it’s a broken system and for silly reasons that > could be avoided. "Fixing" it would decrease their profit, so they have a motive not to fix it. They also have a number of motives to get people off XP and on to $LATEST_RELEASE, which mean more motive not to "fix". The only reason Microsoft would "fix" this would be if they got significant customer pressure. Given the relatively small percentage of people in this situation, I don't think that will happen. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
