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Microsoft reveals Windows Vista price tag
Posted in Microsoft on Tuesday, 29th August 2006 (4 Comments »)
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.