What tech vendors really think: The customer is a cow
Windows 7 incompatibilities drive up the cost of an upgrade, but don't point the finger at Microsoft alone. Vendors up and down the food chain routinely milk their customers
111 RecommendationsAre you a person or a cow? I know that's a weird question, but if someone asked it to me, I'd cop to being a cow -- a cash cow that is, milked over and over again by technology providers of every stripe.
What brings this inelegant metaphor to mind is the launch of Windows 7 and the so-called $119 upgrade. In my case, the real cost of the upgrade for my home office system from Vista is at least $350 and counting, because of incompatibilities with existing application software and peripherals.
[ Pound for pound, which is the better desktop OS, Snow Leopard or Windows 7? Find InfoWorld's answer to that question in our PC vs. Mac deathmatch. | InfoWorld's Eric Knorr shows why Windows 7's upgrade costs for business surpass $1,000 per user. ]
Sure, it could be worse. If I were working in an enterprise, it would cost my company more than $1,900 per XP user to install a glorified bug fix, according to Gartner research. But for a one-man shop like myself, 350 bucks is more than enough pain.
Microsoft has lots of chutzpah charging so much for so little, but the Redmonders have plenty of company. Beta versions of Windows 7 have been available to software vendors and PC makers for some time now, and given the significant similarities of Vista and its successor, I strongly suspect that fixing incompatibilities would not have been all that difficult. But why bother when buyers are willing to be milked for even more money? Mooooo!
And when you think about it, milking consumers has become the dominant business model for much of the technology industry, from cell phones to PCs, cable television to digital cameras. It's no wonder software vendors cried like babies when the American Law Institute suggested that customers who buy buggy software should have (gasp!) the right to sue. Indeed, any enterprise software customer that has struggled with Oracle or SAP and found out just how expensive and difficult it can be to dump a major vendor knows exactly what I'm talking about.
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What recently angered me was discovering that wireless carriers rate themselves against other carriers by how much they milk their customers rather than how gently they handle them. They even have a term for it - RPU, which stands for Revenue Per Unit. If they're getting less per customer, then they consider themselves to be inferior to those that get more revenue per customer, and they will focus on ways to increase their RPU so that they can feel better about themselves, even if it requires pissing on net-neutrality. Moooooo!
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