Comment It's The Old Army, er, I mean IBM Game, Boys (Score 1) 603
As others have pointed out, this 'unbundling' could very well translate to 'charging for what used to be for free', while the 'subscription' part translates to 'and you keep paying for it even though the price is the same as before'.
However, this is hardly a new thing. IBM pulled this same trick in the 1960s (back when they were The Empire, before Bill and Paul wrote their first BASIC interpreter), after a 'consent decree' forced them to allow third-party software and hardware on their mainframes. Interesting how times change so much, and yet so little.
Also, people are forgetting that this was the original plan for Vista, too. That plan ran aground of the sheer size of the installed base; they could not convert the whole system to .Net without breaking compatibility for too many popular programs. It still ended up breaking more than they'd wanted. To do this, they would need to re-write virtually the entire codebase for Windows - while still remaining backwards-compatible. I don't see Microsoft finishing that project any time before the heat death of the Universe.
In any case, how much does it matter? Given the way the three major camps in the field are converging, by the time 2010 rolls around the only way the average user would be able to tell the difference between operating systems is to look at the logo. The limits if Windows emulation on Linux and MacOS are, by some not-at-all surprising coincidence, roughly the same as the limits of backwards compatibility on Vista - because on some level, Vista itself is only emulating the older versions of Windows. If the user interfaces and basic tools are all similar and growing moreso, what is to keep the average user - whose only interest in the thing is to write documents, send e-mail, browse porn, etc. and who neither knows nor cares about the geeky details we here love - from jumping from one platform to another when their only concern is whether they can read the right files and run the right videos?
While this has worked in Microsoft's favor in the past - because it meant that there was no incentive to replace Windows with Linux - it has been hurting them ever since XP came out. The only time most people upgrade to a new version is when they replace their hardware, which has become less frequent as the pace of hardware improvements drops, and the relevance of raw power decreases. To most people, it doesn't matter how slow it goes as long as it runs Word without crashing (and just about any modern system will run Word at about the same speed - the major speed limit these days on Windows systems comes from malware infections, not CPU speed or the amount of memory). Now that some of the major hardware vendors are backing Linux in earnest (because they can sell systems for less money while clearing more per sale), it is possible that users will start buying Linux boxen for the lower price without realizing the difference - even after the system is up and running.
However, this is hardly a new thing. IBM pulled this same trick in the 1960s (back when they were The Empire, before Bill and Paul wrote their first BASIC interpreter), after a 'consent decree' forced them to allow third-party software and hardware on their mainframes. Interesting how times change so much, and yet so little.
Also, people are forgetting that this was the original plan for Vista, too. That plan ran aground of the sheer size of the installed base; they could not convert the whole system to
In any case, how much does it matter? Given the way the three major camps in the field are converging, by the time 2010 rolls around the only way the average user would be able to tell the difference between operating systems is to look at the logo. The limits if Windows emulation on Linux and MacOS are, by some not-at-all surprising coincidence, roughly the same as the limits of backwards compatibility on Vista - because on some level, Vista itself is only emulating the older versions of Windows. If the user interfaces and basic tools are all similar and growing moreso, what is to keep the average user - whose only interest in the thing is to write documents, send e-mail, browse porn, etc. and who neither knows nor cares about the geeky details we here love - from jumping from one platform to another when their only concern is whether they can read the right files and run the right videos?
While this has worked in Microsoft's favor in the past - because it meant that there was no incentive to replace Windows with Linux - it has been hurting them ever since XP came out. The only time most people upgrade to a new version is when they replace their hardware, which has become less frequent as the pace of hardware improvements drops, and the relevance of raw power decreases. To most people, it doesn't matter how slow it goes as long as it runs Word without crashing (and just about any modern system will run Word at about the same speed - the major speed limit these days on Windows systems comes from malware infections, not CPU speed or the amount of memory). Now that some of the major hardware vendors are backing Linux in earnest (because they can sell systems for less money while clearing more per sale), it is possible that users will start buying Linux boxen for the lower price without realizing the difference - even after the system is up and running.
