As the decline of Windows in the global computing market continues to accelerate research firm Canalys has said that it believes Microsoft needs to lower the price of Windows to compensate. Their latest figures revealed a PC market decline of 7.4% compared to the same period last year and a notebook decline of 13.9% compared to the same period last year. They continued to stress that the high price tag of the Windows operating system is one of the primary reasons why manufacturers cannot make their products more affordable to boost falling sales.
“Component pricing has been an issue, particularly with multi-touch screens, though scale economies make this less of an issue as demand increases,” said Tim Coulling, Canalys senior analyst….The price of Windows itself is a contributing factor and one that Microsoft must address as a matter of urgency. Its PC OEM partners are in an increasingly difficult position and consolidation in the PC market is inevitable within the next 12 months.” said Canalys.
There have been several reoccurring media reports of Microsoft offering substantial discounts (around $20 per device) to OEM partners building particular netbooks, notebooks and tablets with smaller displays. Yet these reports haven’t really materialised and the PC market is continually plagued by sluggish demand for Windows based devices. When companies can produce devices with free open source operating systems it remains to be seen how much longer OEMs will consider Windows a viable option for making profitable products – especially in the tablet market where the free Android OS dominates the expensive Windows OS.
With all that said I couldn’t agree more that Microsoft needs to cut prices if it wants to keep the industry in good shape. What do you think about current Windows pricing?
Image courtesy of Microsoft
Listening to people bad mouthing Win 8 constantly I can’t help thinking MS will struggle to give it away but yeah, it could do with a drastic price reduction.