Reasons Market Share Declines

Michael Swanwick explains how a monopoly can destroy itself:

Nowadays, times are much easier but a lot scammier. Last week I had to buy a new palmbook/laptop. Which, I discovered on my first and only day of possession, was preloaded with Windows 7 Starter, a not-fully-functional OS. When I tried to change the image on my desktop, I learned that doing so required that I go online and buy Windows 7 Home Premier. After getting my refund, I talked to salesfolk at various stores and learned that all the new palmtops have the cut-down version because they don’t have memory enough to run W7HP.

Well, each new version of Windows is written far too memory-hoggish for the current hardware. So it only makes sense that the new OS would have fewer features. Still, it was pretty cheeky of them to have it automatically try to sell me an OS that my device couldn’t run.

Apple doesn’t play that kind of game, so if I’d been willing to wait for the iPad to come available, I probably would’ve spent the extra money for it. But I have work to do, so I scrounged around until I found one of the dwindling number of netbooks still running on XP.

As I’ve noted before, they did this on laptops with Vista as well. There is no better way to destroy your reputation that to put out something that doesn’t work.