{"id":3437,"date":"2009-04-26T18:00:26","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T01:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.macnightowl.com\/?p=3437"},"modified":"2009-04-26T16:34:17","modified_gmt":"2009-04-26T23:34:17","slug":"newsletter-491-preview-microsofts-dreaded-secret-the-microsoft-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technightowl.live\/blog\/2009\/04\/newsletter-491-preview-microsofts-dreaded-secret-the-microsoft-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"Newsletter #491 Preview: Microsoft&#8217;s Dreaded Secret: The Microsoft Tax"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A clever way to divert attention from your own shortcomings is to talk about someone else&#8217;s, real or imagined. In business, you focus on the things your competitor supposedly does wrong, hoping they won&#8217;t stop to look more closely at your own failings.<\/p>\n<p>So we have Microsoft making a huge deal about an alleged &#8220;Apple Tax,&#8221; purported to be the extra price you pay when you choose Apple&#8217;s ultra cool Macs instead of an ordinary Windows box. Now regular readers know that I don&#8217;t believe there is such a thing. It&#8217;s a hype, a false claim from Microsoft and Windows fanboys to stem the ongoing erosion of PC market share.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to purchase price, a Mac and a PC, almost identically configured in terms of hardware and software, will be priced really close. The PC may have a slight advantage at the low end of the market, while Macs will beat the mainstream workstations by a surprisingly large margin at the high-end, with the Mac Pro.<\/p>\n<p>But the real price you pay is the cost to own, and that&#8217;s something Microsoft doesn&#8217;t want you to know. They sure tried their best, hiring a hack industry analyst by the name of Roger Kay to deliver a misleading white paper that pretended to show that it costs thousands less for a family to own several Windows PCs instead of Macs over a period of five years.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a title=\"Wait! There's more than meets the eye!\" href=\"http:\/\/www.technightowl.live\/newsletter\/2009\/04\/newsletter-issue-491\/#years\">Story continued in this week&#8217;s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A clever way to divert attention from your own shortcomings is to talk about someone else&#8217;s, real or imagined. In business, you focus on the things your competitor supposedly does wrong, hoping they won&#8217;t stop to look more closely at your own failings. So we have Microsoft making a huge deal about an alleged &#8220;Apple [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10693,8181,202,9631,10692,986,1489,699,580,2122,8146,9317,8849,443,1902,10694,10645,8164,10695,8020,5617,3317],"class_list":["post-3437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-advantage","tag-analyst","tag-apple","tag-apple-tax","tag-box","tag-competitor","tag-hack","tag-hype","tag-industry-analyst","tag-mac","tag-mac-pro","tag-mainstream","tag-market","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-tax","tag-price","tag-roger-kay","tag-software","tag-something","tag-windows","tag-windows-box","tag-windows-pcs"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Newsletter #491 Preview: Microsoft&#039;s Dreaded Secret: The Microsoft Tax - Gene Steinberg&#039;s Tech Night Owl<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.technightowl.live\/blog\/2009\/04\/newsletter-491-preview-microsofts-dreaded-secret-the-microsoft-tax\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Newsletter #491 Preview: Microsoft&#039;s Dreaded Secret: The Microsoft Tax - Gene Steinberg&#039;s Tech Night Owl\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A clever way to divert attention from your own shortcomings is to talk about someone else&#8217;s, real or imagined. 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