Estimated costs and relative value

[elfs]

A top-of-the-line Linux distribution (Ubuntu being the current example) costs about ten million dollars a year to produce, whereas Vista costs an estimated two billion dollars a year to produce.

Is Vista a better operating system than Linux? For the average consumer, to a great degree it probably is: it's more polished and provides more raw operating services, although acquiring the software needed to make Vista productive drive up purchasing costs significantly. Is it two hundred times better than Linux?

No. And that's Microsoft's biggest problem.

Linux's biggest problem, on the other hand, is the slow evolution away from desktops and laptops to small, locked devices like cell phones and portable music players with hardware-based DRM, the licenses for which will lock everyone else out of the development market.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I think the bang-for-buck model applies to the supply side as well. I mean, think of it: in order to be profitable, Red Hat only has to be 1/200th as productive as Microsoft, only has to take 1/200th of the market. That's 0.5%. Microsoft is making that easy.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

This of course assumes that Red Hat's costs are unrelated to Microsoft in any way. Which, given that there are a heck of a lot of people at the other end of 520 who are dedicated to the proposition that all our OS are belong to Microsoft, is not necessarily a valid assumption.

But there is also a smaller but no less dedicated bunch of folk, some backed by some rather large companies, who put their efforts behind keeping software Free... so the difference is only in the rough value of N there, not in order of magnitude. It's still cheaper to build OS's when a fair lot of your devs work for peanuts (or other companies).

The question is, when are Microsoft's shareholders going to figure out that there's no more money to be made building operating systems? Heck, even Sun figured that one out. Supporting them? yes. Metric buttloads. Integrating them with hardware and making it all look slick? Ask Steve Jobs what is bonus is going to be this year. I imagine its handsome. But just doing the grunt work to build basic API's from the ground up?

Hey, Ballmer, wake up and smell the Charbucks,