The Price of Software Licences at Robert Pogson

I can buy a 1 TB hard drive for $96 CDN today. 512 MB was about that a year ago.

I can buy 1 gB RAM for $15 CDN. It was quite a bit more a year ago.

I can buy a motherboard with 6 SATA ports and AM2+ socket for $75 CDN today. I think it as $150 last year.

M$ is increasing the licence fee for its software…

What is wrong with this picture? Has the head of the dinosaur not received the news? The monopoly is dead. The decision must have been made to milk the locked-in users even more to compensate for the loss of market share… There is a sucker born every minute but this should be a “wake-up!” call for many. It is just too expensive to use that other OS.

there is a recession
the growth areas are cheap netbooks
the world rejected Vista
M$ is losing market share to MacOS and GNU/Linux

Has M$ lost its marbles? Has M$ surrenered the countryside and retreated to the cities/high ground? Looks like it to me. They will not get business to go for this. They will not get schools to go for it. The consumer has choices. It looks like 2009 became even better for migration to GNU/Linux on the desktop.

The nearest large city to me is Winnipeg. It is a cheap town. Not that kind of cheap, but everyone compares prices, even for paper-clips. If Joe down the street sells PCs for $250 and Mike sells them for $300, Joe wins. Higher prices for that other OS will not work in this market. I think it is time I opened up a retail store pushing GNU/Linux boxes.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

2 Responses to “The Price of Software Licences”

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1 Richard Chapman May 18th, 2009 at 2:16 pm

I was shocked when I saw that too. It’s the kind of news that makes one check the date to make sure it isn’t April 1st. What are they thinking indeed. Is it arrogance unchecked? They have seen the color of their own blood this quarter and it must have put the fear into them. It could also be that what we are witnessing is a company who does not know how to do business in a market they no longer control. This would be hilarious if they weren’t doing so much damage in the IT sector.
2 Robert Pogson May 18th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I think they have just done this calculation:
- market share lost if we keep same price=5%
- market share lost if we raise price 10%=6%
- result of raising price 10%=1.1X.94 – .95 = +8.4%
and they go for it. They guesstimate what the effect of a change in price will be by surveying the market. They are not wrong in their world of money. We do get more freedom in ours. It’s all good.

In the long run it is better for freedom that they keep the short view… The long view is looking good to me. The more market share they lose the better. They can charge their fans $1000 a copy for all I care. Oops, they do already for 2008…