OS costs

[Rick Richardson]

In article <1114 at upvax.UUCP> stevewa at upvax.UUCP (Steve Ward) writes:

>>> The only thing wrong with this is the capital cost of delivering a copy
>>> of the OS is very small.

>>You forgot support.

>But now Interactive is charging extra for support.

>People don't like having to pay for something they used to getfree.

But large companies do like it, or so they say.

A recent PC magazine article by Jim Seymour discusses this issue.
Support is being unbundled by many (most?) companies so that users
who don't need support or who have in-house support departments
won't have to pay for something they don't use.  For a long time
now, there has been a 'support subsidy' paid for (but not used by)
the Fortune 500 companies.  Unbundle support and the subsidy
disappears.

This makes Fortune 500 companies happy, and the small company
unhappy.  We've got a lot of small companies here.

In theory, support prices are now supposed to reflect actual
costs plus a profit, and the product alone should cost less.
Since vendors seem to always make these changes when issuing
a new, uncomparable release of something, its hard to say if
the software ever really gets cheaper.   I doubt it.

Also, this unbundling of support is a fairly recent thing within
the PC marketplace, where products are well established and
are high volume.  One has to wonder if the UNIX marketplace
is premature in following this lead at this time.

-Rick

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