We are reading too much into this. A little Googling reveals that Apple have always given the software away for free, or a little fee is charged for the installation media or shipping etc. They never really wanted to charge for software. Two, Windows on workstations contributes only about 15-25%, other divisions are doing far much better, and bring in far much more revenue than the Windows division. Look at Office, its a 25% division on its own. Now they have a cloud version for all devices (iPads, iPhones, Android, WP etc), or Apps (strangely, this excludes iPads & iPhones that wont have an app for Office). The Office ecosystem just expanded beyond MS sphere. Now that tells you Windows might just become free in future if the model MSFT is employing works - embedding Bing into Windows search, so that its traffic that pays for the OS, kinda Android. MS is drifting towards Services and Products - thats Windows Mobile and Cloud, kinda Amazon. Windows will drift away as a company on its own at some point (to integrate Skype, Bing and Windows based systems) and behave like Google. Apple can remain tooled into the consumer, but MSFT will not exit (Via NOKIA) without a fight and fright for the PC marketshare (Microsoft 80% marketshare, Apple + Others 20%). As for Surface, until they have GSM/LTE, Nokia (Nokia's slate has LTE) might just carry the day, then all and sundry will follow the success of Nokia - Dell, HP, blah blah blah. We give 3 years to see where MSFT will be, but this is getting exciting, my popcorn's in hand. Peter On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Okechukwu <okechukwu@gmail.com> wrote:
Am late on this discussion (blame it on the airplane mode for last 24 hours), but I think Apple just did a xmas marketing gimmic with the iPad Air - No real upgrade and no real innovation, even the iSight camera is missing - This is one line am going to skip coz come March next year, there will be a real upgrade to the ipad lineup
./Ok3ch