"Bulk Discount" <grin> This was quite a few years back, so I may not be entirely correct with my numbers. But it should still be findable if you look with Goog

"Bulk Discount" <grin> This was quite a few years back, so I may not be entirely correct with my numbers. But it should still be findable if you look with Google. At one time the one-off cost for Windows was something like $140 a copy. But if you, the manufacturer, made an exclusive deal with Microsoft you could buy the Windows licenses in bulk for about $40 each. But to do that, you had to do a 'per unit made' deal. Because it was so much cheaper to agree to the deal, it was worthwhile for most manufacturers. Also, they only had one item to produce, just a "Windows machine" instead of several different types (a "Windows machine" AND a "Linux machine" AND "something else"*). Because the margins on commodity computers are so fine, the difference of nearly $100 in the cost of Windows made all the difference between making a profit and making a loss on the computers they sold. (Imagine the tiny profit on a $400 computer. Not much. Now add $100 to your costs. You haven't got any hope of making a profit if you're paying $140 instead of $40 for the Windows license.) * "something else". At one time there quite a few OS contenders for the mainstream computer market. There was IBM's OS/2 (which was originally a 'joint venture' with MSFT. Except MSFT reneged on the deal), there were a few other minor players too (GEM, SCO UNIX**, etc). But they got swamped by the high costs of joining the market-place due to MSFT under-cutting them with the exclusive Windows deals. ** SCO UNIX is an interesting case. It was originally called SCO Xenix. SCO had bought Microsoft's UNIX ("Xenix") which was a UNIX V7 clone.