[TriLUG] MS gets smart - strikes deal with universities

[William Ward]

All the more reason to press the administration with the other costs 
associated with this infrastructure:

1.  Support fees to MS.
2.  Expensive third-party software.
3.  Insecure and low-quality code.
4.  Hardware costs and upgrade cycles.
5.  Computer software auditing overhead, because you KNOW they'll be 
back to make sure you bought everything they demanded.

Bill

On Sunday, September 29, 2002, at 06:12 PM, Matt Matthews wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 29, 2002 at 05:46:22PM -0400, Jon Carnes wrote:
>> Microsoft has made a deal with University of Nebraska and is looking 
>> to
>> extend that to other Universities. The university pays a big lump sum
>> for a licensing contract and then all the students can purchase
>> Microsoft products at Employee prices: WinXP OS for $4.99, Office for
>> $9.99, ...
>
> Why isn't this considered "dumping" product onto the market at 
> abnormally low
> prices? I thought that in certain circumstances this was illegal. 
> Furthermore,
> I would think that an established (by the courts) monopoly would be 
> subject of
> even more stringent rules of conduct in the marketplace that would 
> prevent
> this.
>
> I saw this story yesterday, and it made me angry. I realize that this
> effectively does what some have said would have to happen eventually 
> due to
> market pressures (lower costs of the OS and apps to 'reasonable' 
> levels) but
> this seems to be going too far that way: dropping the price to flush 
> the
> market of competitors, both free and non-free. Is it good for the 
> consumer?
> Short-sightedly, yes, it is because they get stuff they "need" for low 
> prices;
> but in the long-term this entrenches an established, unhealthy 
> monopoly even
> more.
>
> Regards,
> matt
>
> -- 
> Matt Matthews     \ ph: 919.660.2811        \ Use GNU/Linux  _o) w00t
> Duke Univ., Postdoc\ jvmatthe at math.duke.edu  \____________   /\\
> Dept. of Mathematics\ http://www.math.duke.edu/~jvmatthe/ \ _\_V
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