

What's Really Driving Apple’s New-Found Fondness For ‘Free’? - NatCrodo
http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/23/opinion-what-is-really-driving-apples-new-found-fondness-for-free/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+%289+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence%29

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calciphus
It's so weird to continually hear authors parrot the claim that the trivial
cost of an OS upgrade is relevant to businesses. Fact is, any business over
about 20 employees has a Microsoft Software Entitlement license, where you pay
(substantially under market price) per user for Office, Windows, etc. And
Software Entitlement is valid across all currently supported versions of the
OS and Office. That means that if your company is running XP and Office 2003,
it's entirely because your IT group didn't want to go through the trouble of
upgrading everyone (and retraining users), NOT because of the cost. The time
to test various enterprise apps and ensure they work and work reliably is
expensive. Just because Apple wanted to encourage a bunch of bloggers to
update their Airs isn't going to be a tipping point for Apple into any real
market share - in fact it'll harm their chances in the future when they stop
issuing security patches to a 2-year-old OS because "upgrades are free".

What is driving Apple's new-found fondness for free is that they don't want to
deal with supporting older OSs. Unfortunately, that's a requirement for being
in the business world. Apple has just excluded themselves from it.

