Windows 7, Snow Leopard, and revisionist history
Microsoft zealots ignore their platform's past in an effort to bash Apple and Mac OS X
Follow @infoworldLast week, Microsoft revealed that Windows 7 would be priced similarly to Windows Vista. There were some discounts to be had -- a kind of "Crazy Eddy" pre-order sale for upgrade licenses -- but by and large the retail cost remained the same.
This, of course, resulted in criticism within the blogosphere. Some claimed that Microsoft didn't go far enough with its discounting -- that the company should essentially give the product away for free to Vista users (which is not going to happen) or at least be more aggressive with its stated retail pricing, which ranges from $130 to $200 depending on the Windows 7 version.
Many of these critics were Mac enthusiasts referencing Mac OS X Snow Leopard's more palatable-sounding upgrade price of $29. And they were quickly countered by the Microsoft apologists who noted how Windows 7 will at least run on some older systems, whereas Mac users with pre-Intel hardware are left out in the cold with regard to Apple's latest Mac OS X release.
[ Find out what Mac OS X Snow Leopard brings to business in InfoWorld's in-depth analysis. ]
It's this latter argument that caught my eye as being somewhat disingenuous. While it's true that Windows 7 will run on older hardware, the reason it can has more to do with the stability of the Intel (x86) platform than any altruistic impulses on Microsoft's part.
Simply put, Microsoft has never faced the kind of fundamental architectural shift that Apple was forced to navigate when it abandoned the fading PowerPC platform nearly four years ago. In fact, the closest thing to Apple's Intel migration within the Microsoft realm would be Windows NT's long-forgotten support for the MIPS R4xxx and DEC Alpha platforms. And even there, Microsoft ultimately abandoned those dead-end platforms in favor of more tightly focusing on the volume Intel architecture.
