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Story: The Manx turn from Unix to Windows

Posted by: Anonymous (Thursday 2 December 2004, 7:14 PM)

"I am a technical person," continued Paterson, "but this is not a tech decision. It is a business decision. Too often it is presented as a technical decision, but really it is about the wow you give to the end user at the end of the day."

No, it should not be a business decision. It should be a political decisnion. Going for closed source software makes it harder to freely share information with the citizens. In the long run this could create democacy problems, or do the intend to give a copy of windows and a computer that runs it to all people that need to access information stored in propriatory Microsoft formats. I think not.

One other thing, am I really getting this right? Did they finish upgrade to win95 in 2003?! If that is the case Microsoft have a problem. If people don't upgrade more than once every 8 year they will not be able to keep their prices at a reasonable level.

The problem might be even worse than that since the once you have upgraded to the NT series of Microsoft OSes, each new upgrade gives less and less return of investment and I would even go as far as saying an upgrade from win2k to XP will give you a financial loss.

If this trend continues we could expect people to upgrade only every 10-15 years. Microsoft will have to compensate for this somehow. Raising the price of the OS is probably not possible, that would make it hard to hook new users. So my guess is that the support costs for Microsoft will go up significantly in the future.