Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
That's not historically true. None of it. I was involved in sales/support/installs of Windows for decades. I could write 1000s of words with references. You could switch off Vista eye candy and have it very like XP or Win7. Win7 was really SP1 of Vista. Not a new version.
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You in fact are the one that is incorrect. Performance benchmarking around Vista consistently failed when compared to XP. It required much stronger hardware to support questionable features such as Aero Glass which would still bottleneck the system due to GPU and RAM constraints. Additionally, there was the lack of driver support
and software compatibility upon release. These factors combined with the overall lack of user adoption was why the Win7 release date had to be expedited (Vista didnt even last 3 years...)
As rcentros wisely stated, folks at the time had much more constraints around being bounded to an OS. Switching to Apple or Linux would be a much more costly expense.
News Flash!! Kobo isn't the only supplier of BW e-readers on the market. If you aren't happy with their current model feel free to check out a Pocketbook or a Kindle.
Additionally, people in this thread are having trouble understanding why it would be a logistical nightmare to produce both models so I'll happily break it down. Even though the devices have an identical external look, the internals are anything but that. Has anyone considered that apart from a screen there is a whole different set of electronics to enable the (much stronger) battery and support of the stylus pen???
The production line doesn't just support an interchangeable switch between the Libra models. To put it simply, in order to produce a unit of the Libra2, a unit of the Libra Color would need to get sacrificed. Along with the time and labor to reconfigure the production line.
This would lead into my next point of economies of scale. Kobo's most profitable path is to lower the cost per unit as much as possible. This is done by bulk ordering parts from their manufactures as well as being efficient on the production side. I'll leave it to you guys to do the remaining math on the best strategy to increase profitability.