Microsoft Said To Cut Windows Price 70% For Low Cost Devices 178
kc123 writes with this except from Bloomberg News: "Microsoft is cutting the price of Windows 8.1 by 70 percent for makers of low-cost computers and tablets as they try to fend off cheaper rivals like Google's Chromebooks, people familiar with the program said. Manufacturers will be charged $15 to license Windows 8.1 and preinstall it on devices that retail for less than $250, instead of the usual fee of $50. The discount will apply to any products that meet the price limit, with no restrictions on the size or type of device."
Re:Whoop-de-do! (Score:3, Interesting)
I bought two copies for $15 each back when it first came out (promotion lasted for 6 months, was considering buying more just in case). Went from Windows 7 Home permium to Windows 8 Pro. Wasn't too bad of a purchase: 1) it's faster in games, 2) it comes with Hyper-V, 3) non-English language support (especially Chinese and Japanese) is much better than Windows 7. So what about Metro? What Metro? I have Classic Shell installed so I never see it.
Google top honchos are strategic masters (Score:5, Interesting)
It participated in the spectrum auction and made the telcos pay near market rates. It bought dark strands of the fiber network after the market crash to protect itself from local last mile ISPs from holding it for ransom.
It talked to WhatsApp, made an offer of 10 billion with lots of poison pills. It set the floor at 10 billion, leaving all the smaller players aside. It knew Facebook was despo and will buy WhatsApp, but it boosted the price and made Facebook pay dearlym 35% of cash on hand!. Please disregard the 19 billion dollar figure. That is based on overpriced FB stock price. That Facebook will be strapped for money in the coming year for other aquisitions is the key victory for Google.
WhatsApp's 450 million users includes millions who create new accounts every year when their old free for the first year accounts expire. Those users are penny, nay, paisa pinchers who use WhatsApp to avoid international texting charges between India and the Gulf countries and Singapore. They use WhatsApp to broadcast their texts to N recipients paying 1 outgoing text charge. In India incoming calls and texts must be free by law. Only the sender pays. 2 dollar per user? You can't chisel 2 rupees out of them. Anyway WhatsApp has no advantage when it comes to smartphones. Its explosive growth was due to it being the portal to the intenet for dumb phones via SMS. That market is done.
Unorganized linux tried to scare Microsoft with netbooks. Microsoft hit back and evenutally killed the netbooks market, though it had to extend XP's life to do so. But Google resurrected the netbooks markets, and is forcing Microsoft to engage in price war again. Given the drop dead simplicity of the Chromebook, and low cost by eschewing the bells and whistles of the tablet market, it is very difficult to see anyone make any serious money off them. But it hampers the others from raising their profit margins.
Google plays the strategic game stupendously well.
Re:Good-bye middle tier (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem for Microsoft is that it sells only to corporations and gamers. Both are not as price conscious as home users. But it has to fight a rear guard action to keep the home user in the fold. Otherwise they taste competing OS and see how others do it and demand Microsoft's feet to fire. They demand interoperability. There are people who have more powerful computing platforms in their pockets iPhones/androids/tablets than the corporation provided desktop they work on. The company workstation PC is hampered by layers and layers of IT clunkiness loaded on top of Microsoft cluelessness. I think this 15$ is just a PR stunt to fool the stock analysts, in reality Microsoft would be giving OS away for free without telling analysts.
Re:Microsoft, the former leader (Score:2, Interesting)
For a single-server shop, Samba4 is a good choice (even for migration away from a Windows server). For sites where you need more then one DC, there's still room for improvement.
We started migrating off of Windows starting 5-8 years ago when we put in our first Linux server. Since then, any new "server" application has been chosen to work on a Linux server. We went from 90% windows servers down to just a handful left. Samba 4.1 will kill off the remaining file/print servers for us. We might have zero Windows servers by the end of 2014.
On the desktops, we have very few applications that tie us to Windows and we're constantly working on reducing that count. Which gives us the flexibility to deploy either OS X or Linux to more end-user desktops instead of being 90% Windows.
Re:Good-bye middle tier (Score:4, Interesting)
$35 is also, depending on the phase of the moon and where you fall in AMD and Nvidia's release cycles, enough to get you bumped a tier or two in GPU capability. HDDs are a similar story, you aren't going to do anything radical for $35 bucks(say a switch form cheap 'n capacious HDD to screaming-fast SSD); but you can probably squeeze 1 'unit' of additional capacity, exactly how many gigs that is depending on the conditions of the day and whether you are buying HDD or SSD, out of your vendor for $35.
The less-visible-at retail stuff like fit-and-finish, case materials, what gets to be metal and what gets to be plastic, are harder for me to comment on; but 'just $35' can likely buy you 1 'bump' in any of the major spec areas, or some additional classiness in build quality. Especially if your ass is being kicked on industrial design grounds, or user dissatisfaction with your failure prone PSUs, that's not something to dismiss lightly...
Re:Ah yes... (Score:4, Interesting)
However, there are some rough edges: You need to buy new gear to replace or expand an existing lab/laptop rollout? Well kid, I'm afraid that Apple's OS support is as follows: The earliest supported OS is whatever the machine shipped with. The last supported OS is the version before the version that has your model in the 'installer will refuse to try' list. Oh, you wanted to expand a lab running OSX version N-1 without upgrading the entire lab to version N? That's so sad, good luck.
Even more vexingly, Apple has largely left the server business (they don't have a single device with redundant PSUs, their 'preferred' OSX Server config is a mac mini with two HDDs); but they steadfastly refuse to simply sell licenses that 'bless' VM instances(not running on physical macs) to run OSX Server. For $1000, they'll ship me their little mini, with its two laptop drives and OSX Server; but they don't even offer a 'keep your shiny little toy and enjoy the higher margins, just let me spin an OSX VM on my institution's preexisting, high-reliability, physically-distributed, high-uptime, SAN-backed, etc, etc. VM infrastructure. We have the cores, we have the RAM (with ECC and stuff, crazy!), we have the SAN, with the fancy disk monitoring and redundancy features. Why won't you take our damn money?
Re:Chromebook (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux will inherit the Earth. Tremble, M$ Office paperclip.
Not that it's a real problem, Linux is a decent embedded OS(arguably markedly worse than some designed for the purpose at Hardcore Embedded Stuff; but familiarity and smooth scaling from fairly tiny embedded systems to supercomputers counts for a lot); but the 'ChromeOS' is something of a historical irony:
Remember, back in '95, when Marc Andreessen threatened that Netscape would reduce Windows to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers"? That struck MS as plausible enough that they squished Netscape as hard as they could and (slowly) got off their ass on IE development; but look upon ChromeOS, and observe the OS reduced to a set of device drivers by the browser..
Re: At last (Score:4, Interesting)