The PC Weenies

The less software costs, the more people will buy it. Apple lowered their upgrade price, and upgrading became the easiest thing for old users. None of this “I’d like to upgrade, but it doesn’t GIVE me anything”. Now it is “I’d like to upgrade, and SURE I have 30 bucks.” 99 cents? Now people pile on the purchases.

Apple could no more raise the price of every app in the App Store 5 fold than Windows can afford to raise the price of their OS 5 fold. Now, remember when Snow Leopard was a 29 dollar “Special Price Upgrade”? That was supposed to expire. It never did. Look at the Lion price today. Apple realized that lower price was amazing with encouraging people to upgrade.

I wish Microsoft luck. I think they may find it easy to live on XBox sales, and they may need to.

I hope we’ll see more people replacing Win7 with an assortment of relatively easy to install & maintain Linux-based OSes: Mint, K/X/Lubuntu, PCLOS, Mageia, openSUSE, and such. It will go much easier for them should they choose to just install over Win7, rather than try to make it work with Secure Boot under Win8.

Windows 8 has been… interesting. The start menu is ideal for a touchscreen environment, but terrible for a mouse, and they removed out-of-the-box DVD playback as a lame cost-cutting measure, other than that it’s largely the same as Win 7.