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by detuur
3030 days ago
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You've answered your own implied question. The price of MS Office is still high because it's in a category of its own, with no competition in sight. But all it takes is one well-motivated competitor to achieve feature parity and that would be the end of MS Office's cash cow position. MS is already offering Win10 basically for free. Not because of competition, but because it doesn't cost anything to make it free. They can risk changing their business model without being forced to throw money down a hole. |
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Features are only a small part of how users consider change - and 'parity' definitely doesn't cut it.
Office is a good example ...
StarOffice originally and then RedHat, Suse, Mandriva (and the previous versions), Canonical and a host of other commercial Linux vendors I'm forgetting, plus Sun, IBM, Linux Foundation, etc have all put resources into competing.
OpenOffice is feature equal for most users - but, it didn't make much of a dent.
For me the Windows 10 situation is partially about competition, but it's mostly about protecting their core market. For the most part they make money from corporate users, not users buying 300 dollar laptops - those are just market capture for the serious money. Any time you hear a parent say "Jonnie is learning MS Office" (not word processing) that's a future corporate buyer.