Asus makes a laptop, the 1015E. It comes at two retail price points: $249 and $299. Identical hardware, the difference is the OS. The lower priced version comes with Ubuntu OS, while the higher priced ships with Windows 8. Conclusion: Manufacturers pay $50 to put Windows OS on a machine. This isn't news, however, and has been commonplace for awhile.
Considering you are paying $300 for a computer with Windows, that means that the OS is ~17% of the purchasing cost. That's pretty substantial. But now let's look at how much it costs to stay up to date with the current OS. Suggested retail price for the latest Windows OS is $119. Let's suppose you bought a $300 computer recently, but before the release of the latest OS. This means that you paid $50 for an OS that almost immediately became obsolete. To upgrade, you'll have to pay another $120 or $170 in total software expenses and a grand total of $420 for the machine. Ultimately, 40% of your spending has been on the OS alone. That's pretty bold of Microsoft.
Let's look at Apple. Since OSX 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") Apple has committed themselves to distributed new versions of their OS at a very low price, which started at $29 and has been reduced to $20 and most recently, free. Similarly, their iOS had historically cost $10 per upgrade, but has been free for quite sometime. Basically, Apple has recognized that the OS literally has no value to the user. That most people are more than happy to stay on a certain outdated OS even if there are newer, shinier versions are available, but at a higher price(i.e. over 30% of computer are still on Windows XP). Apple has instead focused on hardware, and consumers pay about 30% more for a product with a glowing half-eaten fruit fashioned on the back of it.
So why doesn't Microsoft do this? Well they can't, yet. Until recently, Microsoft produced very few computing devices. Their sales relied solely on the selling of software, such as the Windows OS. However, with their recent acquisition of Nokia, the huge success of the Xbox systems, and the finally useful Surface 2 Pro, Microsoft has made its way into the hardware field. What does this mean? Well hopefully what it will mean is that the price of Windows will drop considerably, at least if you're buying your hardware directly from Microsoft. Additionally, what it will mean is that Microsoft will be able to focus on producing high quality and reliable hardware, similar to Apple.
In the coming year, many businesses will be faced with a serious dilemma. Microsoft will no longer support their very dated Windows XP. This means that the units still running XP (most of which are corporate machines) will become insecure. Sure they can download high-end antivirus and firewalls, but in the end XP will become insecure on a kernel level (no amount of antivirus can protect the kernel). Even if you have just one XP-running computer on your network, every other computer will be consequentially, insecure. Many business owners will have no option but to update to Microsoft's latest OS, Windows 8.1. Remember that $119 price point? Well that's reflective of the Home Edition, Microsoft charges a whopping $199 for the Pro, or business edition. Also, remember that 30% of computers are still on Windows XP? The total number of computer units in the world is 1.63 billion which puts XP units at just under 500 million. This means that if all those units are updated to the latest version of Windows, the total cost would be ~$80,000,000,000 (assuming that the units are split evenly between home use and professional use). This is insane.
So you've just finished reading this extensively long post. You may be wondering what to do with this new information. A huge problem has been laid out, but no solution has been given. Well prepare to see the full circle of my argument. Recall that $249 Asus computer that runs Ubuntu OS? That means that Ubuntu, or Linux is.. free. Always free. And can be installed on any hardware. It doesn't need some shiny half-eaten piece of fruit to make it run better. It "just works". If you're running Windows XP, and you're thinking about upgrading to a newer OS (which you definitely should be), then don't feed into the corporate arrogance of Microsoft's outlandish over-priced software charges. Make the switch. Do Linux.
