Orrin Bloquy's Journal: ROI on commodity computers as a M/PC flamewar gambit

"Incidently, if you are a Mac owner, and you've paid for every major release of OS X, you've paid about $500 over the last 5 years for your operating system. Compare this with $120 (assuming 2k upgrade) for the last 5 years for an XP owner."

Offhand, how many people do you know who are using XP SP 2 on the same PC they bought in 2001? What did they pay to upgrade their HD, memory, and if they're gamers, their video card? Are they excited about having slow memory, a PIII, USB 1.0, and a BIOS that can't boot thumbdrives? Are they still using the same tube monitor and ball mouse they bought in 2001?

Bottom line: If Apple made most of their money from hardware vendors whose practices guaranteed replacing the entire package every thirty-six months and corporate/governmental customers locked into product dependence, they could also afford to low-ball the OS costs.

But in terms of business models, they aren't even the same kinds of economies, much less economies to comparable scales. Microsoft's largest customers are wholesalers, governments and corporations; Apple's are still predominantly end users at the bottom of the economic food chain -- where things are expensiver but the sales figures are never misleading.

Why does that last part matter? Back in the 80s, Apple had distributors everywhere around the planet. No matter how small your town was, you probably had a store with a rainbow fruit window sticker. It was great for presence. It was great for PR. It was fuck-awful for sales. Few of those dealers were Apple-only shops, and people bought the crappy PC compatibles they figured they could afford. Apple's retribution towards their distributors made Alec Baldwin's scene in "Glen Garry Glen Ross" look like "The Horse Whisperer." National retail partners like Sears dicked them around on how long they'd sell their merchandise. Even Dell gets it that computers on shelves equals death coming soon.

The guy who sells to Wal-Mart is taking it in the ass, too, because his margins are constantly being squeezed and his "partner" is telling him to outsource to China to get his profits back. In comparison, Microsoft has not only a steady source of income but comparatively little complaint about the rates they're charging. The PC makers gladly fork over $50 for XP Pro, and the corporate customers are being told flatly that they can expect a subscription model whether they like it or not. In return, the drones get an OS guaranteed to remain backwards compatible to every badly-coded VBA corporate app their ancestors wrote.

Now, Vista. Because Windows couldn't evolve gradually, all of a sudden it requires a new breed of hardware, a new box, and damned little in return on the investment.