thank you for proving my point wonderfully. If Microsoft did not have a control of a commodity in a particular market, that makes it possible for them to manipulate the prices, Windows would be priced competitively. However Windows is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than any of it's immediate "competitors".
Interesting ... I pay 160 CHF for OSX 10.5 and 147 CHF for XP Pro SP2. Even Vista Ultimate costs only 247 CHF.
Really makes me think what you do. Wasting 600 CHF to get the "full support" version instead of the DSP version? (as you have to pay for phone support in both cases after a few minutes there is no reason to waste 600 CHF = 600 USD on the non DSP versions).
Both are fully compatible for at least 5 years, unlike OSX which will become semi compatible every 2-3 years, so Windows makes the better long time investion actually.
Even commercial Linux distributions have a hard time keep up at against that price as the linux longtime compatibility and guaranteed behavior is a thing I don't think we need to talk about
And claiming that there is no credible alternative because MS has the monopoly is one of the largest soup bubble dreams I've heard in a long time. Lets face the truth: Would linux be a credible alternative: YES. So why isn't it one? Because there are 20+ Linux distributions and the effort is wasted on 20+ different OS' and philosophies instead of focusing on a SINGLE STABLE WORKING CORE LINUX DISTRIBUTION + different "top level differences". Those brickies will never get anywhere until they understand that they do not stand the least chance in the real world until the pull at the same rope!!
Currently, this means following a more user friendly and user oriented path like Mandriva or (urgs) SUSE ...
At this rate, most Linux users soon will learn which is the best unix based distribution and no its not a tuxie world incarnation, its actually OSX. Bad but true and the longer the Linux Community is such a mess and split up the lower the chance that they survive their "unix is better than Windows fight" against the far more user oriented Unix Experience of OSX.
They lost their benefit of beeing X86 based unlike OSX years ago but still don't realize their situation.