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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

>>people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0

This is precisely why I think Apple won't last much long in the mobile/watch battle. Android is like the Windows of the 90's and early 2000's. Available for free, with hardware largely being a commodity, and all Google caring about the traffic and market penetration. Apple will have to growingly fight to push their products into the market which is flooded with cheap android devices offering the same features/capabilities.

In fact this is already happening in India and China.

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> Available for free

Windows wasn't ever free (until very recently, and even that isn't exactly the whole story). A big reason for the sheer quantity of bloatware on Windows PCs even nowadays is because that bloatware subsidizes the cost of Windows.

I know (and agree with) what you're getting at (that inexpensive commodity products dominate more easily than expensive niche products in a given industry), but comparing Windows and Android isn't exactly a perfect analogy.

yes it was

One had to infringe to get it, but it was totally easy to get it for free.

Notice the improved licensing really didn't happen, until saturation did?

Being lax on licensing meant running Windows was possible for everybody, and that bought a lot of share.

If we were to return to that early era, and Windows had the licensing it does today, or even something potent, what do you think would have happened?

Legally it wasn't free. But illegally it always was, at least it was as good as free.

In fact Microsoft itself wanted people to do it. Because if students and ordinary people pirate their OS, they will be trained to use it in everyday life. Later on, they would sell the OS to enterprises when the same people would eventually work there. That way they can always claim their OS was the most widely used OS in the industry.

Plus if they hadn't let people freely pirate their OS, Linux would have eaten their lunch big time.

Free as in legally free is what I meant; otherwise, we can argue all day that OS/2 and Solaris and OS X and IRIX were "always" free since it was (and indeed, still is) possible to pirate them.

You're also significantly overestimating the number of folks who actually installed Windows themselves, let alone who did so with a pirated version. Most Windows installations are OEM preinstallations, and Microsoft has been well aware of this (and actively encouraged this, albeit being dinged in the process for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act).

> In fact this is already happening in India and China.

This might happen at some point but they certainly haven't reached that point yet. Apple revenue is still growing tremendously YoY in China. [0]

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/27/apples-revenues-in-china-so...

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