They used to give away free copies of MS Office at Military conventions to senior personnel. The idea was that those people would start using the new default formats and others would be required to buy upgrades. It worked quite frequently that I know of.
I don't have the exact data for an item like the crunchpad/joojoo, but for nearly everything I bothered checking, the price differences are quite often less than 25%.
Regardless of exactly how much this margin is, it is not wise for anyone to be straddling the fine line between the maximum consumers are willing to pay and the minimum a factory is willing to charge.
I leave it as an exercise to the doubters here to investigate by themselves. I am done wasting my time finding specifics just to further an argument on the internet.
Thank you for sharing your well-researched insightful opinion that clearly reflects many decades of experience in the industry. It's exactly for comments like this I come to Hacker News every day, I feel like I learn new things all the time.
Taking issue with the requirements is a perfectly legitimate technical complaint and you see lots of people complain when some new web application is flash-only.
There's some hyper-sensitivity going on here today.
Hyper-reactions are always telling. My bet is that these people feel somewhat threatened. The fact some Microsoft users and enthusiasts feel that way here is, itself, very interesting.
