{"id":18703,"date":"2013-10-24T10:54:37","date_gmt":"2013-10-24T08:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=18703"},"modified":"2013-10-24T10:54:37","modified_gmt":"2013-10-24T08:54:37","slug":"on-the-price-of-the-operating-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2013\/10\/24\/on-the-price-of-the-operating-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"On the price of the operating systems"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wired.com<\/a> is running a good piece on the price of the operating systems. \u00a0It covers a bit of history and shows how things are now and how it all came a full circle – from free operating systems of the past, all through highly profitable years of Microsoft and Apple, and back to free operating systems of today’s mobile world.<\/p>\n

In a way, operating systems are returning to their roots as a kind of loss leader. Before the personal computer revolution of the late 1970s, operating systems were just one piece in a vertically integrated stack of technology, a stack that also included hardware and support services. Operating systems like Unix and VMS were used to sell minicomputers and workstations, and companies made their profits on hardware and support contracts. OSes such as BSD UNIX were\u00a0completely free<\/a>, and programmers would pass them around at will. Under the same philosophy, Apple\u00a0gave away<\/a>\u00a0new versions of its Macintosh operating system until the crisis years of the late 1990s, when hardware sales slowed dramatically.<\/p>\n

In the rapidly developing smartphone and tablet markets, tightly-coupled stacks are once again dominant, so OS makers can subsidize their operating systems with profit from the products integrated into them. Google, for example, subsidizes its mobile OS by selling online ads, and, in theory at least, by selling Motorola-branded hardware. Apple\u2019s iPhone profits come from hardware and service sales, not the OS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article also shows how problematic is this new situation for Microsoft.<\/p>\n

Microsoft\u2019s OS sales\u00a0once<\/a>\u00a0generated 47 percent of its revenue, but they contributed just 25 percentlast year<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0decelerating Windows licensing<\/a>\u00a0(and even that figure is inflated by ad revenue from Windows Live). In response, Microsoft is restructuring as a \u201cdevices and services\u201d business \u2014 meaning a company that sells hardware like the Xbox and web services like Azure. In other words, it\u2019s becoming more like Apple. Apple isn\u2019t really a software company. It makes software and services that run on its own hardware devices.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However …<\/p>\n

Yes, even Microsoft is moving towards the vertical stack. It recently acquired phone maker Nokia and sells its own tablets. But this game of cross-subsidizing the operating system will be tougher for Microsoft, since the company is no Apple when it comes to hardware \u2014 and no Google when it comes to online services. The company rose to prominence in the horizontal PC era, when Microsoft could play one hardware vendor against another, dictate prices, and keep a computer\u2019s hefty OS markup hidden from consumers. Those were the days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And more specifically:<\/p>\n

So to the average consumer, the 21st Century sea change in OS pricing might not be particularly apparent. But to Microsoft shareholders, it will look very real and very scary. The company must make up that 25 percent somewhere else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n

Wired.com is running a good piece on the price of the operating systems. \u00a0It covers a bit of history and shows how things are now and how it all came a full circle – from free operating systems of the past, all through highly profitable years of Microsoft and Apple, and back to free operating … Continue reading On the price of the operating systems<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,62],"tags":[2190,1968,2400,286,2076,2077,1531],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-18703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-business","tag-google-android","tag-history","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-windows","tag-operating-systems"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7641,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2004\/07\/05\/the-operating-system-resource-center\/","url_meta":{"origin":18703,"position":0},"title":"The Operating System Resource Center","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"July 5, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"\"The Operating System Resource Center\" is a nice collection of links to loads of information about software and hardware subjects that usually come into mind when talking about computer operating systems. Boot process, hard disks, partitioning, file systems, processors, memory management, etc. Update (July 17th, 2016): Since the original website\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":15470,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2011\/09\/06\/the-purpose-of-an-operating-system\/","url_meta":{"origin":18703,"position":1},"title":"The purpose of an operating system","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"September 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I came across a good reminder of the operating system's purpose in this Slashdot comment: The point of an OS is to make the software independent of the underlying hardware. Windows lost that independence a LONG while ago (Windows NT \/ 95). Linux still has it because of the underlying\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8233,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2004\/11\/18\/format-c-versus-rm-rf\/","url_meta":{"origin":18703,"position":2},"title":"“format C:” versus “rm -rf \/”","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"November 18, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Jokes about \"format C:\" and \"rm -rf \/\" are pretty frequent in the computer universe. These two commands will supposedely remove all data from the hard disk - one on DOS\/Windows and another on UNIX operating systems. While widely used, this might not be exactly true. 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Topics covered include binary and binary logic, operating systems internals, toolchain fundamentals and system library fundamentals.","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":28048,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/10\/04\/optimizing-web-servers-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency\/","url_meta":{"origin":18703,"position":4},"title":"Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"October 4, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Dropbox Tech Blog has this in-depth article on \"Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency\".\u00a0 It goes over everything from hardware and low level operating system stuff all the way up to the application level. 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