on Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 12:40:01AM +0100, Steve Fosdick wrote:
So why would M$ try to adopt this new model now rather than at any previous time? There may be a number of reasons including:
The internet makes license adminstration cheaper.
Perhaps the market of people techically minded enough to buy a PC
with the known complexities and problems is exhausted and people are looking for something simpler at home.
- It provides additional lock-in opportunities.
I think also there is possibly another reason; it's quite hard to sustain a reliable income on software by constantly releasing new versions. (And a lot of effort.)
Customers want backward/forward compatibility, so you should provide this. But this removes part of the incentive to upgrade. In fact, when comparing word xp to word 97, etc, there doesn't appear to be *that* many ground breaking features between them. So why upgrade? There are only so many features a word processor can have.
Would you upgrade from Washing Machine version 1.0 to Washing Machine 2000 at any other time than when Washing Machine 1.0 broke/got too old? With Office the "too old" cycle has been quite small, but I don't see that many people jumping from Office 2000 to Office XP, so perhaps it's increasing.
The last of those is the most interesting. A typical business application of a PC requires an office suite that is capable of reading MS Office documents, a web browser and e-mail and very little else. With free software to do all of that business can buy a large number of PCs and equip them with software without paying a penny to microsoft! This way of working is becoming increasinly realistic now. How is microsoft going to get its cut of these companies money? Perhaps through network based applications.
Or patents/standards.
I'm awaiting microsoft's "extensions" to X11, just like they "extended" Kerberos and "extended" CHAP.