I totally agree and you are proly one of the very best example of that
statement.
Frank

Ah yes, 1 in 3 dollars MS makes is pure profit, and there were nearly 5
billion of those pure profit dollars this quarter alone. MS is doomed.

BTW, Apple is golden these days, can do no wrong. Their numbers were also
released this week, and interestingly, their *total sales* revenue only
slightly exceeded MS's *profit*. That gives you an idea of their relative
positions. And Apple only makes about 15 cents on the dollar. Too bad they
can't dup iPods out of thin air the way MS can software.

What can go wrong is that acts designed to boost sales may backfire,
if the envelope is pushed too far.

The problem is that the balance between pre-release and post-release
development is moving towards the latter, and this is open-ended in
terms of just how much it will cost.

Before, when most effort was pre-release, you could figure a selling
price (or work within a set price) and off you go.

Now, the future of cost of patching and support can blow out beyond
the planning that set the selling price, and there's not many ways to
generate new income from these committments.

In fact, MS could find themselves between a rock (high resources
needed to support shipped product) and a hard place (low resources to
develop new products and revenue streams).

If there's a die-back in demand, and thus revenue from new products,
then this can become terminal.

Given these rtealities, it would suit MS much better to switch to what
I call "rental slavery", i.e. annual payment just to keep using
whatever you have, with updates/upgrades being force-fed into the
system (as 'protection against exploits' etc.) whether you like it or
not.  That gives MS an adjustable income that no longer depends on new
sales to existing users, and makes it easier to keep everyone on the
latest version, thus less legacyware to retro-develop.

But that's quite a jump from today's EULA to a completely different
model of charges, costs, and obligations.  Who will negotiate this?
Will MS enjoy enough market confidence and trust to simply present
users with a new model, or will they squander that trust with dumb-a.s
annoyances and "super-scalar licensing" before then?

The Pentium was the first PC processor that could excute multiple
instructions at once, breaking through the "how much faster can each
instruction run?" roadblock.

Current MS practice is pushing towards selling more than one license
(for the same product) to the same user. breaking through the "how
much more can one charge per license?" barrier.

For example, your PC comes with an OEM "airbox" MS Office 2007, and
your HD fails.  How do you reinstall MS Office?  Just buy it again.

Or you get a laptop with XP Starter on it, hit a problem like this...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914906

...which forces you to "just" wipe and rebuild - or do you let the OEM
up-sell you to XP Pro instead?

Or your PC gets stolen, and because the OEM sticker is stuck to the
case, your license is stolen too.  MS support shrugs and say
"insurance will pay", i.e. you have to buy another license.

Or you scrap your PC and aren't allowed to transfer the license to a
new one, because it's "different", etc.

Or your XP keeps demanding to be activated even though no hardware has
changed, and eventually you cave and just buy again.

Now these sort of shenanigans may work in the short term, but they are
squandering goodwill.  Right now, there are no lifeboats, but that
could change very suddenly... all that has to happen is for Apple to
open up MacOS (which is already *NIX and Intel-based) for PCs and drop
thier brand, retail outlets and support behind it, allowing (rather
than blocking, as they currently do) cross-polination from PCs and
Linux.  Sure, don't expect Jobs to do it, but the next broom might.

 Our senses are our UI to reality

That's as maybe, but he still has a problem.. :-)

He seems to be pitted against large corporate, especially MS, and hates
Vista with a passion.. he has never used it though.. the thought of lining
MS pockets absolutely abhors him.. yet he still uses XP.. oh well

You forgot to belch and snort.

Alias

Not my IP address. Nice try, though. Reading the posts, however, doesn't
show that that Alias is obsessed with others' money and neither am I.

Alias

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As you state below, Microsoft has already done that.
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I see him more like a Barry

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Looks like Microsoft has already brought computing to the masses.
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, who knows where we would be if some of the smaller\smarter

How many people would instantly be out of work if everything Microsoft were
to disappear over night.

What would Alias do?

Not really. If the price is too high people will not buy it in the numbers
that Microsoft expects. Then Microsoft will lower the price. I have been
paying roughly the same for all full install NT versions of Windows since NT
3.1. This goes back to July 27, 1993  for NT 3.1.

Can you understand this? The price is substantially the same.