On Saturday 21 February 2004 16:17, Michael Hendry wrote:
> http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209-1009195,00.html
Of course, the _first_ such offer they made was to the Government of Thailand.
MS have run into the problem that having declared they have a one-price for
the world policy, they now have to drop the price toward the actual value of
an operating system and set of office applications or its market value if one
believes the two to be different.
Since this is about Euros 2 plus the cost of installation they have a problem,
particularly since SuSE 9 is cheaper ti install, Debian is cheaper to update
(# apt-get install) Gentoo is cheaper to upgrade (# emerge world) and all
Linuxes are heading toward a more standardised base configuration.
Presumably now they propose to increase the number of variants on offer we
will hear less about the merits of cross-training - IE health admin staff
finding they are using exactly the same software they werre taught on at
school (or will school Windows and school Office split into a colelction of
arguably different variants) and less abut the confusion of having different
setups...
There is no level on which it makes any sense at all expcet that of MS
maintaining an artificially high price point in the face of market
rationality.
The ring has melted, the eye is shattered, everywhere Orcs are discovering
traces of Elvishness in their ancestry and background.
--
Adrian Midgley (Linux desktop)
GP, Exeter
http://www.defoam.net/
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