2 ms·

I'm confident that many PC manufacturers would be happy to remove the crapware themselves, if they could find customers who would pay extra to offset the revenu

by quesera 12y ago

I'm confident that many PC manufacturers would be happy to remove the crapware themselves, if they could find customers who would pay extra to offset the revenue they'd lose. Their margins are so thin that crapware keeps them in business. And since the hardware and (windows) software is commoditized, they compete with very few points of differentiation. Build quality, fit and finish, battery life? Those customers go to Apple, by and large. And never come back. And this is why Apple will never license OSX. Why they'll never sell it to you to run on a hackintosh or a non-Apple host VM. They literally cannot afford to. Consumer Windows will never escape the swamp unless Nadella changes the licensing restrictions, thereby raising the price of all Windows machines across the board. I really hope this happens -- but I'm not sure he's brave enough. There might also be legal fallout. Windows Signature Edition (seriously?!) is available today, if you are willing to go out of your way, but it is not a mass-market product.

smacktoward 12y ago
> I'm confident that many PC manufacturers would be happy to remove the crapware themselves, if they could find customers who would pay extra to offset the revenue they'd lose. Which is exactly why only Microsoft can solve the problem. When it's up to the OEMs, if even one OEM chooses to keep the crapware, they can undercut the others on price and eat their lunch. So the others are forced by market pressure to bundle crapware too, in order to get their prices down to the same level. If any one OEM tried to break the cycle, they'd just get clobbered by the market for having higher prices. It's a classic race-to-the-bottom scenario. The only thing that can break the cycle is if the choice is taken away from the OEMs entirely. Then no one bad OEM can start the cycle over again. But only Microsoft (well, Microsoft or the government) is in a position to do that.

by quesera 12y ago

smacktoward 12y ago

> I'm confident that many PC manufacturers would be happy to remove the crapware themselves, if they could find customers who would pay extra to offset the revenue they'd lose. Which is exactly why only Microsoft can solve the problem. When it's up to the OEMs, if even one OEM chooses to keep the crapware, they can undercut the others on price and eat their lunch. So the others are forced by market pressure to bundle crapware too, in order to get their prices down to the same level. If any one OEM tried to break the cycle, they'd just get clobbered by the market for having higher prices. It's a classic race-to-the-bottom scenario. The only thing that can break the cycle is if the choice is taken away from the OEMs entirely. Then no one bad OEM can start the cycle over again. But only Microsoft (well, Microsoft or the government) is in a position to do that.