Notice how a legal copy of Windows still costs you at least $99 at Newegg?
Yep, prices drop quickly when a monopoly has no credible competition. Or not.
You have to expect to pay something for a product. Prices won't fall to nothing either.
And FYI a legal copy of windows can cost as little as 29 USD if you are a student and as low as 15 USD if you work for certain corporations and universities.
I have purged all MS OSes from my house. What can Windows do for me that Debian or other free unix-like systems can't do?
Dunno... play games, run popular major software, play a simple video without needing a command terminal and a C++ manual nearby?
I kid somewhat, but this logic does offend me on an intellectual level. You act as if everything you can possibly grab for free you do regardless of how difficult, time consuming, or inconvenient it is which is far from true. You cherry pick microsoft in this regard; in regard to a million other things that you could get for free had you chosen to put the same time and effort as you did into learning Debian, Unix, programming languages etc, you most likely have callously subconciously said "meh I'd rather just pay for it because it works as it is". The fact of the matter is, there is a certain gestalt people enjoy by being against the grain, not mainstream, being different. Strangely but truely, its very hard to accept by a lot of people that many things that are popular and used by the majority of society often are that way and reached that position because they are quite good at what they do. I don't know what your computer needs are specifically but don't knock Microsoft for putting out their product because I assure you for everyone like you who hates paying for it to where they feel the need to purge it from their homes, there are 999,999 who will gladly will.
As for intel and their so called monopoly, the fact of the matter is they still fall under the laws of supply and demand. Nobody needs cpus (unlike things like food and water which don't fall cleanly under those laws). People want them and if the cost is too high people will find a way around them to get what needs to be done done. This will serve to naturally check cpu prices. Ask yourself what will happen if all the silicon in the world began to run out next year. CPU prices will go up, technology will find ways to get around needing cpus, and cpus will either fall in price or become irrelevant. Its no different if intel artificially raises prices. Sure it'll hurt a little in the meantime that prices go up, but people and technology will always prevail.After all, its why we are still here as a species after all this time.