It looks like Acer, for one, may not have any excuses for much longer. According to several Australian news sources (1, 2 subscription required, 3), Bill Gates himself - at a press conference in Sydney, Australia - announced that pricing for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, which has been claimed by Acer and thoroughly covered in the news media as being the source of device manufacturers' woes with sales of devices based on the platform, will drop to the same level as the base Windows XP Professional operating system of which the Tablet OS is a superset.
When asked by Alex Zaharov-Reutt from Free Access Magazine if Microsoft would be lowering the price of the Tablet OS to standard desktop OS prices to aid adoption, Gates responded: "Yeah, Tablet in particular we're bringing the licensing for Tablet Windows to be the same as Windows Pro. It wasn't much more, I think it was fifteen dollars more or something like that but we're bringing it down somewhat there."
News source: Full story @ techSage.ToString();
