Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The presumably unintentional posting of Windows Vista pricing on Microsoft's Canadian web site (how could Microsoft let that happen?) shows that being in operating systems is a great business if you happen to be the incumbent monopolist.
Without going into specific versions - there are getting to be so many
- the Canadian prices start at about US$233 for a basic home edition
and go up to US$449 for the bells and whistles Vista Ultimate edition.
Of course, US prices can be expected to be slightly lower than in
Canada or anywhere else - exactly why, we're not sure.
At a conservative estimate, the number of Windows PCs in the world is
due to reach about 1 billion sometime in 2007. This means that
Microsoft has a global operating system market of at least US$200
billion all to itself. Not too bad really.
Some analysts contend that people rarely pay the list price for
Windows. They either upgrade their existing system at a discount or buy
a new machine, where the price is buried in the cost of the computer.
Baloney.
Why should we assume that the cost of the operating system is any less
than list if we buy it with a computer? A quick call to a friend who is
in the PC reseller business confirmed that people are currently paying
almost exactly the list price of Windows when they buy any of his or
other reseller's PCs with Windows pre-installed.
Sure, if you upgrade your existing box, you'll pay less for Vista. And
so you should, since you've already outlaid a small fortune for a
previous version of Windows.
Microsoft is going to do some great business over the coming couple of years. It's good to be the king.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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