The Vista Sales Numbers: Anatomy of a Wash
,----[ Quote ]
| "Vista unit shipments were down 59%, but Microsoft gets approximately 80%
| of their OS revenue from the OEMs - PC manufacturers," Swenson reported.
| "So it's really important to focus on them predominantly when you're trying
| to figure out how well an operating system release is going to do; and when
| you look at that 2007 launch week versus the same week in 2006, PC unit
| shipments were up 67% year-over-year." Those numbers were provided by
| Swenson's NPD colleague, Steve Baker.
|
| [...]
|
| By "search costs," he's referring to the economics concept advanced by
| Nobel laureate Prof. George Stigler, beginning in the 1960s. Stigler
| researched consumers in the era before e-commerce, when they
| researched major purchases by perusing catalogs and shuttling
| themselves between shopping malls.
|
| He came to the conclusion that consumers will research their
| purchase until the point where they conclude that their "search
| costs" -- perhaps weighed more psychologically than monetarily --
| will have exceeded the value of any further information they might
| acquire. At that time, Stigler believed consumers would decide to
| make the purchase or not.
`----
http://www.betanews.com/article/The_Vista_Sales_Numbers_Anatomy_of_a_Wash/1171917974
Related:
The Longest Suicide Note in History
,----[ Quote ]
| Gutmann: The genie's out of the bottle before the operating system has even
| been released! But that doesn't mean Vista users in particular - and
| the computer community at large - won't end up paying for Microsoft's
| DRM folly. At the risk of repeating myself repeating myself, yet
| another reason to move to Linux.
`---- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
http://blogs.pcworld.co.nz/pcworld/tux-love/2007/01/the_longest_suicide_note_in_hi.html
|
|
