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Microsoft reveals Windows Vista price tag
Posted in Microsoft on Tuesday, 29th August 2006
According to Neowin, Windows Vista will hit the shelves with a $499 CND price tag. That’s for the Ultimate Edition, which is the equivalent of Windows XP Pro. Home Premium and the Ultimate Upgrade are listed at $299. Any reasonable person would look at this pricing scheme in disbelief. You could build your own PC for the price of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. Unfortunately, a lot PC gamers will be forced to upgrade if they desire DX10 support. In addition, with the advent of “Home Theatre PC’s” many private users will seek Windows Vista for their multimedia centres. From a corporate perspective, I don’t see any justified reasoning to upgrade from Windows XP/2K to Vista at the moment, at least on workstations.
What can we expect from this pricing? Firstly, it’s going to encourage further pirating which is a trait for [a great majority of] proprietary software - Especially from the gaming community who may posses the technical knowledge to do so. Secondly, I feel that many users will simply stick with 2K/XP labelling them as “Good Enough”. In contrast, I hope that it encourages users to seek out free [or less expensive] alternatives to Microsoft operating systems such as Linux.
I especially like the descriptions of the various editions of Windows Vista on the Microsoft website.
Windows Vista Home Premium
Whether you choose to use your PC to write e-mail and surf the Internet, for home entertainment, or to track your household expenses, Windows Vista Home Premium delivers a more complete and satisfying computing experience.Windows Vista Home Basic
Windows Vista Home Basic is designed to deliver improved reliability, security, and usability to home PC users who just want to do the basics with their PCs.
They boast that the Premium Edition allows you to write e-mail and surf the web. Fantastic, but where does it leave the Basic edition? Well, it’s designed to deliver the basics. I was under the impression that e-mail and web browsing were already basic? Heh, that said I’m sure I’m just playing on their words.
August 30th, 2006 at 8:34 am
Yeah, it’s a fucking joke.
OH WOW! VISTA LETS YOU BROWSE THE INTERNET?!?!?!? THAT’S AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!
Like I keep saying to people, there is no reason why the mum and dad users of home desktops could not simply ditch Microsoft altogether and go with an overal more secure, feature-rich and cheaper alternative — LINUX!
However, people are ignorant, and will prefer to spend $500 on an operating system when they could instead spend $0 and invest a little time instead.
August 30th, 2006 at 8:53 am
No, no. You’ve got it all wrong. There’s perfectly legitimate reason for there to be sixteen and a half different versions of Vista. Well, a semiperfectly legitimate reason, at least. It’s called tiered pricing, I think, and the ultimate goal is to make people feel like they need to pay “just that little bit more” for “that one extra feature.”
We even help. “Oh, no, don’t be silly. Let me give you XP Professional, it’s got more features!” Then they go buy it. Whoops.
In other news, I read the other day that IE7 is going to run in a sandbox in Vista.
September 3rd, 2006 at 1:05 am
I often do Raki in a sandbox, it’s quite amusing. In all honesty, I think it’s a terrible scheme to milk additional money out of customers. The other day, my father informed me of his friend and his strange computer habbits. He turns his computer on in the morning for 20 minutes, then switches it off after he’s quickly checked his email in fear of a virus/spyware infection. WTF? This guy is actually AFRAID to use his computer. I think that’s terrible, and it’s made me wonder if other people behave the same as this guy? It’s these people who probably aren’t aware of any alternatives and need to be shown them.
September 3rd, 2006 at 2:16 am
…or, echoing Owen, people could just get a free desktop for exactly $0 including GST.