January 2, 2008
Microsoft can inflict Vista on us, because we expect it to
Berkeley Electronic Press is a wonderful institution and was ahead of its time when established in 1999, but BEPress editor Aaron Edlin doesn’t want to be ahead of his time any more. He wants Windows XP:
We now buy Dells with the old operating system (though we have heard that won’t last forever) and scrounge around for “new” versions of the old MS Office 2003 elsewhere, which we install ourselves. The added time and expense is worth it…
Now people complaining about Vista is nothing new, but Edlin has a good layman’s expectation of why Vista can catch on even though I’ve never met a person who likes it:
Microsoft controls many things. Obviously, it owns its old software and can decide at what price to sell it and whether to sell it at all. And Microsoft owns its new software. More subtly, Microsoft can control expectations. And expectations turn out to be everything when network economies are substantial, as they are in software markets.
If everyone tomorrow woke up expecting that the world would shift to Apple within six months or a year, then sales of Windows would plummet. Why buy a Windows machine when all your colleagues will own Macintoshes and can help you on them, but not on Windows? Why buy a Windows machine when all the independent software developers will program for the Mac’s new Leopard system, and not Windows? The expectations are self-fulfilling.
Edlin’s proposal?
I hope the antitrust authorities give serious consideration to a remedy that Ian Ayres, Hal Varian, and I have developed. Suppose Microsoft had to allow licensing of old versions of Microsoft software at a reasonable price (perhaps the price of the new version) whenever Microsoft brings out new versions. This would give Microsoft an incentive to make sure that new versions were compatible and significantly better than old versions—otherwise, the new versions wouldn’t sell, or at least wouldn’t sell easily. Wouldn’t it be great if Microsoft’s new software had to compete successfully at least against its old software? Then we would know the world was improving.
In the meantime, he’s trying to change our expectations by urging everyone to stick with XP…
They also must compete with Linux.
Posted by: Martin | January 13th, 2008 at 8:34 am | Report this comment