Re: I wonder why...

Point was that MS is one greedy bastard and it wouldn't occur to them to reduce their price everywhere instead of trying to persuade hardware to lower theirs in order to lower the cost of the total package. Over the years the price of hardware has steadily fallen while the price of the MS OS has risen.
If MS hadn't resorted to using unfair business practices ages ago to drive the competition from the market, I believe that today they would be out of business or at the very least a mere shadow of their current monopolistic empire. MS has never competed on a fair business level on the basis of quality and has only survived because their business model was one of insuring that they were the only choice and their under the table dealings and backdoor coercion of OEMs to include their OS with every box sold.
With MS's current dominance in the marketplace, unless more legal action is successful, it will be a very long time before we'll see competition return a quality product and some small fraction of the variety of choices enjoyed by the consumer in the hardware side of the computer business.
I beleive that the only good MS OS is the one that they consider dead. Long live DOS! LOL