Opinion: Mine’s cheaper than yours

Well, d’oh!

And BMWs cost a tad more than Hyundais as well. Stop the presses! Hold the front page!

At what point in time since Apple first released a notebook were they ever cheaper than a Windows equipped notebook?

If it ever happened I must have blinked and missed it. But maybe that’s no longer the point. Is Microsoft admitting defeat?

Is the real Microsoft message an admission that Vista sucks so badly when compared to…well…almost anything…that the only reason left to use it is to save a buck?

That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of their latest operating system. But of course the enterprise crowd got hooked on Microsoft’s Office suite a long time ago, so they’re not about to rush off and buy a bunch of Macs.

They’ll just stick with WinXP and cause Microsoft a support headache.

Perhaps the smart thing to do would be to port the entire Microsoft application suite over to Mac OS X and let Apple sell itself into a stupour.

Since OS X is unix-based, Microsoft would then have the code base to release the Office suite on Linux.

Imagine how much better their application code could be if they didn’t have all those dudes tied up making a mess of things in the operating system division.

If they simply can’t bring themselves to ditch Windows, then why not split the company into two divisions?

Let the Windows division stand or fall on its own merits and let the application division thrive as it no doubt would, since the only real complaints we hear about Office these days are the price tag.

Nobody seems to be up in arms these days about whether Office works or not, and the open source crowd have paid it the ultimately compliment by cloning the thing and giving it away for free.

That people still pay for the real thing tells us they’re doing something right, but the number of people still downgrading from Vista to XP tells us they’re also doing something wrong.

But yabbering about who makes the cheapest notebook isn’t going to win any fans over to Vista.

Particularly when the only Vista worth using is the 64-bit version which requires a notebook that costs as much as a MacBook anyway.

Maybe the argument should be over who offers the best value in a 64-bit notebook?