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Interesting read which brings me to another point. Outside of deployment on new PCs (inertia), how does their business model even work? The numbers I've heard on development cost ($6B to $10B) and the implication that not many (relatively speaking) copies will be sold for upgrades, etc, why did they even bother?


The Vista DRM core is a strategic necessity for them, to forceably lock users into MSware in the future (and lots of other such benefits, for MS not the user).

That's why they bothered.

Plus, the per-unit manufacturing cost is essentially zero for preloaded software, so on 100 million new PCs with Vista forced upon the users, MS makes about ($100/copy?) ten billion dollars in revenue, easily offseting development costs. And it'll get preinstalled on a lot more than a mere 100 million new boxes..

Of course, they could have just just continued with XP on those boxes, and fired their development staffs instead, with the same net profit. Except they've got competition now, so they really do need to update the software once in a while.

Cheers