I have to imagine it’s because most of their money comes from business customers who rely on windows and would have to spend tons of money to switch to something else or OEMs who are making new computers anyways who this won’t affect. There’s a reason windows upgrades have been free for a while, I don’t think they really care about getting money from people anymore, they’re just after money from businesses and OEMs.
But what’s the net benefit if they overall lose a ton of market share? Sales of, absolute best scenario, 10 million dollars? That’s a lot of money but it’s also really unlikely they’d get that level of sales and is it worth having a shareholders meeting in 1 year where they have to address questions about market share continuing to slide noticeably? Apparently I guess
It seems like it would mainly be a good deal for oem pc manufacturers. If I was lenovo or whoever I’d be jazzed about it, let microsoft take all the negativity and sell more thinkpads
Yeah I agree I don’t think it’s a good long term strategy, losing the dominant position is gonna make it easier for businesses to seriously consider switching to Mac, Chrome OS, or Linux. And when more people start to switch the OEMs will follow. It’s the classic short term profit over long term success approach that companies will always fall into. For now it provides a nice bump in sales through mainly OEMs selling new computers to people and down the line through the businesses who don’t want to make the switch or can’t make the switch so are forced to buy new windows computers. But yeah it’s probably gonna continue to sink their market share if average people can’t use the new OS and are smart enough to switch to something else. Although I’ve seen people still using Windows XP while connected to the internet so who knows if it’ll even be a big impact or not. It will really just depend on if enough people switch that more programs get ported to other OSes and then businesses can actually make the switch more easily. And if that ball gets rolling Microsoft’s market share will keep tumbling down, but again it’s hard to say if that’s gonna start or if Microsoft is gonna have to do a lot more bad things first to get there.
I have to imagine it’s because most of their money comes from business customers who rely on windows and would have to spend tons of money to switch to something else or OEMs who are making new computers anyways who this won’t affect. There’s a reason windows upgrades have been free for a while, I don’t think they really care about getting money from people anymore, they’re just after money from businesses and OEMs.
But what’s the net benefit if they overall lose a ton of market share? Sales of, absolute best scenario, 10 million dollars? That’s a lot of money but it’s also really unlikely they’d get that level of sales and is it worth having a shareholders meeting in 1 year where they have to address questions about market share continuing to slide noticeably? Apparently I guess
It seems like it would mainly be a good deal for oem pc manufacturers. If I was lenovo or whoever I’d be jazzed about it, let microsoft take all the negativity and sell more thinkpads
Yeah I agree I don’t think it’s a good long term strategy, losing the dominant position is gonna make it easier for businesses to seriously consider switching to Mac, Chrome OS, or Linux. And when more people start to switch the OEMs will follow. It’s the classic short term profit over long term success approach that companies will always fall into. For now it provides a nice bump in sales through mainly OEMs selling new computers to people and down the line through the businesses who don’t want to make the switch or can’t make the switch so are forced to buy new windows computers. But yeah it’s probably gonna continue to sink their market share if average people can’t use the new OS and are smart enough to switch to something else. Although I’ve seen people still using Windows XP while connected to the internet so who knows if it’ll even be a big impact or not. It will really just depend on if enough people switch that more programs get ported to other OSes and then businesses can actually make the switch more easily. And if that ball gets rolling Microsoft’s market share will keep tumbling down, but again it’s hard to say if that’s gonna start or if Microsoft is gonna have to do a lot more bad things first to get there.