[Info-vax] 2009 VMS Bootcamp notice

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Jan 24, 1:03 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> > With "business ethics" like that, what chance does a big MS customer
> > have of breaking the habit?
>
> How big of a customer would one have to be to get all the special
> treatment from Microsoft ?
>
> In fact, how big of a customer does one need to be to be allowed to deal
> directly from Microsoft ?
>
> And if you are allowed to buy directly from Microsoft, what does that do
> to the MS tax that is already included in the hardware systems you are
> buying ? Does this mean that you'd have a 3way between you, MS and the
> hardware vendor and MS telling the vendor to not charge the MS tax on
> the systems sold to you ?

You have to be very big. You'll have a global account manager with
Dell, HP, or IBM for example. Your desktops are probably outsourced to
someone with a global account manager (or whatever their equivalent is
called) at Microsoft.

Wrt hardware tax on desktops: from my previous post, the money needed
to reduce the impact of the Wndows desktop licence on end user and
supplier changes hands via "marketing support from MS to the suppliers
at risk". Marketing support from MS themselves to MS resellers of
various flavours will itself be subject to various lock-ins from MS,
which is why every mainstream PC advert or website (manufacturer or
retailer) currently says "<vendor> recommends Windows Home
Premium" (or Vista Business or whatever) - commit to putting that on
your ad for the foreseaable future and MS pick up some proportion of
the cost - like the "Intel Inside" advertising deals of days gone by.
All of these tactics are perfectly legal and legitimate unless a
monopolist abuses them to (for example) produce "unreasonable barriers
to entry" into a particular market, which is a different subject for a
different discussion.