Welcome back.

To keep it pithy, I think it’s worth re-iterating here that I don’t believe this to be a war with Microsoft or Apple, as I stated yesterday.

I think it’s worth re-stating for several reasons.  First of all, the coming “war with M$” is still all everyone can talk about today. I simply couldn’t get away from it, even as I sat down to veg out in front of the television last night, and was faced by my friend MG Siegler on G4’s Attack of the Show repeating the same talking points he’d established earlier in the day.

Here’s the problem with the whole “clash of the titans” angle: it’s not staunchly defended turf.

MG rightly diffuses the argument that Apple is vulnerable, but not for the reasons he gives.  It isn’t that people view their iPhone as a non-computing platform.  I think that the many years of Steve Job’s iPhone marketing (not to mention the hordes of fanboys like MG in the blogosphere preaching how it’s “changing mobile forever”) have taken care of that.

No, Apple isn’t vulnerable because their business doesn’t rely on cheap and efficient computing platforms.  Take that concept, flip it on it’s head, and that’s exactly Apple’s target market – expensive and pretty computing platforms.

Make all the arguments you like about how Apple hardware and software is superior, but you’ll never get around the fact that they’re the most expensive computers on the market, and the folks like me – people with middle income families, several kids, and not a lot of disposable income – aren’t going to gravitate towards that (let alone families and individuals who make less than I do).

We’re going to gravitate towards cheaper machines that get the bare essentials done.  If we want a powerhouse gaming unit, we’ll spring for a second generation gaming platform for the kids.  If we want a machine that’ll edit video or run Photoshop, we’ll find a second hand computer we can install an old copy of Premier and Photoshop on.

…And when we need a machine to check our email, tap out some blog posts, and surf YouTube, we’ll buy a $200-300 netbook running Ubuntu or XP on it.

… which brings me to why Microsoft doesn’t much care either.
Netbooks aren’t powerful machines, generally.  You can’t manufacture first generation hardware and sell it for under $700, let alone $300.  At that price point, you’ve got barely enough room to pay hardware costs.

Given that and the fact that Microsoft has been trying to phase out XP usage, sales and licensing for the last several years, do you really imagine them to be making huge profits selling old XP licenses?

Selling licenses of Windows on price-slashed netbooks isn’t a major financial win for Microsoft, I can almost guarantee. The fact that there isn’t much price difference between a netbook running Linux and XP is a testament to this.

So this coming war that everyone keeps bringing up?  It’s not happening.  It’s not even a battle.  XP will slip quietly into the night, and both Microsoft and Apple will breathe sighs of relief as the burden of unprofitable customers slides away from their responsibility to pay attention to.

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