Swap Blog

Microsoft profits are double this year from last due to the lack of legal expenses this year. Profits from the Windows PC division were slightly down due to less sales of OS’s in retail enviroments (i..e upgrades or full OS’s not sold with new boxes). XBox sales were up.

We at Team Swap fully support a market economy, but if their profits have doubled this year maybe we should see a drop in prices this year or next. Something tells us that will not happen though when you consider that during the PC revolution the price per MB of RAM has gone from $1000 per MB to less then .25 per MB, the cost of hard drive storage has seen even greater drops, as have the cost of high speed printers (both lazer and ink jet) and larger and better quality monitors, but the cost of the OS for a PC has remained stable, and increased slightly, while functionality and dependability of the OS have not increased in proption to the rest of the PC.

Compare for yourself. We will only go back 10 years, not all the way to the orginal PC’s in the mid 80’s to make our point. Consider XP versus Windows 95 (or even 3.1). XP allows the computer to offer the user sound, video, productivity, email, and inet access, but so did 95 (and 3.1). So there has not been a great step forward in what the OS does - what has changed is the power of the hardware and the applications that the OS drives. XP is more stable then ME, but 98SE, 98, 95, 3.1, 2000 and all the DOS varieties were more stable then ME so that is not a great claim. In the end, XP is merely a more powerful and more stable version of 95, sure there has been improvemetns, but the actually power increase is found in the refinement of it’s abilities, not in additional features.

Now look at application software - compare Word 95 , to Word 2002 HUGE increase in power and functionality. The same is true of Photoshop 3.0 vs Photoshop 7.0, Dreamweaver 2 vs Dreamweaver MX 2004, AutoCad circa 1995 vs AutoCad2005, and numerous other pieces of software. The power and functionality has increased dematically. Now look at hardware, in the the mid 90’s 16MB of RAM was avearge in a PC, today 512MB of RAM is average. 20GB Hard Drives then vs 200GB HardDrive in average PC today. 8 bit color vs 32 bit color. 16bit 250MHz CPU’s to 32 & 64bit 3.0+ GHz CPU’s. So in the last 10 or so years there has been a tremendous increase in the power and funciton of both application software and hardware, while the cost per function of each has dropped. This has not been true in the OS world.

So, in the end it should be of no surprise to anyone that Microsoft profits more from their OS’s then other divisions because they have not had to innovate and expand that part of their business as much as they have in more competive sectors like gaming, application software, hardware, and such.

Full Story here .

P.S. - Note that Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) came out today,more Linux is out there then ever before, Solaris well is still solaris and Firefox is now around 50 million downloads - maybe there will be some pressure on Microsoft to innovate a bit. Longhorn is a long way out at next Dec at this point (we will also see if that ship date sticks….in the past Microsoft has not hit delivery dates well either) so maybe Microsoft will do some innonvation in the next 18 months.

P.S.S. - to the 10 or so visits that we get a month from the AmigaOS….ROCK ON YOU LEGACY FREAKS!!!!! When we get a visit from the AtariST OS we are going to pull out the old 520ST with dual floppies and a 13″ color monitor and make it a kitchen counter broswer.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 11:03 am and is filed under News, Personal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.