A few years ago, a letter of mine was printed in LAN Times magazine (RIP) that pointed out that while the price of hardware was falling steadily, the price of Windows was rising steadily. I suggested that this economic anomaly was due to MS monopoly power.

The latest PC Week reports an advance notice from MS on Windows 2000 pricing which give $319 for the price of Windows 2000 Professional. Picking up a catalog for WWW.TIGERDIRECT.COM I see a Win98 system for $450 (233 mhz Pentium MMX, 32MB, etc.).

Consider a clone manufacturer that wants to retail a W2K machine for $400 sometime next year. What is their manufacturing cost? $300, $200, $150? How much of that goes for W2K? 50%? 75%? 110%?

See what I mean about reaching the point of absurdity?

Peter Robinson