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I'm not quite sure what Microsoft is up to regarding its Surface pricing scheme, but it is making mistakes left and right. An $899 price tag is simply too damn high.

Back when Microsoft was a mischievous monopolist playing dirty every chance it could, this would never have happened. One of the tricks up its sleeve was the effective practice of lowballing the competition.

During the long-forgotten encyclopedia wars of the CD-ROM era, Microsoft virtually decimated the competition by lowballing its Encarta encyclopedia, offering cheap bundling deals to computer makers. Within a couple of years, there was no competition. Microsoft coasted with the product, selling discs and...