Voor het geval je 't nog niet gehoord hebt: Mikroschoft heeft ooit het belachelijk plan opgevat om een jaarlijks bedrag te gaan vragen voor Windhoos. The Register heeft er een artikel over, waarvan hier een stukkie:
Microsoft has considered charging an annual fee for Windows use, according to a memo to Bill Gates produced in court yesterday. The document, from December last year, came from senior VP sales Joachim Kempin, and was headed: "Licence for limited time and create annuity business."Kempin suggested the scheme could start in 2001, apparently because in order to do this in the consumer market, the move would have to be made from the launch of a new rev of the operating system. He points out to Gates that he's made the suggestion before, and that it now needed serious consideration. Awkwardly for Microsoft, which was yesterday denying accusations of putting its prices up over the last two years, the memo shows that Kempin was a year ago anticipating PCs down at the $500 level by Christmas 1998, and saying "our royalties could be as high as 10 per cent of total system price…" Nevertheless Microsoft should resist royalty price decreases firmly, he said - i.e., Microsoft's pricing should not fall in line with PC pricing, and Microsoft's percentage share of a growing market should therefore rise. Oops…
And oops some more: "We have increased our prices over the last ten years… other component prices have come down and continue to come down." Nevertheless Microsoft's goal was to get the "highest amount of dollars" it could from its OEM customers. Triple oops…
