Microsoft Charges “About $50” for Windows to OEMs, Bing Hits 10%

There’s always been mystery surrounding how much Microsoft charges OEM’s for copies of Windows, but part of the truth was revealed during the Jefferies Annual Technology Conference in New York. Microsoft’s Charles Songhurts, the GM of Corporate Strategy, said that the benchmark for a PC yesterday and today has been $1,000, and for that PC, Microsoft charges “about $50“.

That’s fine, but it becomes confusing when talking about PCs that are either higher or lower than $1,000. Given the $50 value on a $1,000 PC, we can assume that either it’s $50 for most PCs, or 5% up to a certain value. Truly, unless you work for an OEM, chances are you’ll never know exactly how it works. With netbooks, and Windows 7’s ability to run on them, it’s very unlikely that it will cost $50 per copy, but I could be wrong.

If I had to make a hunch, I’d assume that Microsoft scaled the pricing, but I cannot see the OEM pricing going  much above $100. Yes, the retail copies are far higher, but while you are purchasing a $200 copy of Home Premium, companies like Dell are buying millions. I think it’s safe to say, though, that when you buy a pre-built PC, you’re getting Windows for less than you would straight from a store.

In unrelated Microsoft news, the company is sure to be thrilled at the news that their decision engine “Bing” has hit a 10% market share, and to that I say wow. There are various Microsoft entities that utilize Bing, sure, but the search only became available in June. At 10.7%, it has roughly 1/6th of the search traffic as Google. It’s important to note that this is all US metric, and the rest of the world is not included.

I’m actually glad to see Bing doing so well, because I use it as my primary search engine and like it quite a bit (see, Linux users do use Bing). It even helped me find the best price for plane tickets last month for the trip  down to San Francisco for IDF. If you need to book a flight.. give it a try. It’s actually quite intuitive and fun to use. I admit, I still go to Google for some things, but if I do, it’s always really technical. No other search engine has been able to touch Google where those kinds of searches are concerned.

Songhurst went on to reveal a number that Microsoft has made a point not to disclose to the general public: how much it charges OEMs for Windows. “If you think of the $1,000 PC, which has kind of been the benchmark for the last decade or so, then we’ve always charged about $50 for the copy of Windows for that PC,” Songhurst revealed.