The reasons you give are not very good reasons when one considers competitive
vs non-competitive markets.
Take the restaurant industry as a really good
example of a competitive market. Compare MS - the company and expenditures,
where those go - to your basic restaurant.
Consider - for example - MS
management to employee ratio. I don't have the inside scoop, but if my guess
work based on what vague information is available publicly is reasonably
accurate, MS has an almost 1:1 ratio. That's one manager for each employee that
actually produces product/service. I think it's a little higher then that -
around 1.3 to 1 - but that's why the magic word "close".
Pick any
restaurant you'd like. The ratio is likely at least 1:8. One manager for every
8 employees that actually produce product/service... and likely the manager is
busy as a host/waiter/waitress as well as.
Can you imagine what the
prices on the menu are likely to be like if you walked into a restaurant, saw 4
servers handling the customers and 4 managers there each making sure things were
running smoothly? Out from the kitchen come 3 more managers - they're
responsible for the 2 cooks and dishwasher in the back.
Yea - MS has
costs... and the customer ends up footing those costs in the shelf price of the
product. But that doesn't detract from the fact that the software actually is
near zero cost if one compares what it actually would cost to build the
equivalent product (minus all the bloat and bugs) in a competitive market place
then spread those costs over a customer base as large as MS'.
If the OS
marketplace was truly competitive (and there's no reason the basic OS shouldn't
fall into being a commodity type product) With just a 30% mark up for profit
margins - I'd be willing to bet you'd be paying little more then the cost of
the:
physical dvd
pretty wrapping
Commonly developed products
that people use - like your basic word processor - are mature enough, they
should also fall into the realm of the "commodity software".
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
| 
