Dvorak on Microsoft Confusing the Market

DigitalDame2 writes "With news of there being 7 Vista editions, PC Magazine Columnist John C. Dvorak takes a hilarious spin on the different Vistas with some recommendations of his own. How about the Vista Porn Edition? All the great porn sites would be pre-bookmarked. Gamer Case-Mod Edition? It can be ultraoptimized for games with a blinking hard-drive light. You can even go as far as the Microsoft Vista for Costco Customers: the Cheaper Edition."

Comments

Ain't it funny?

[Lispy]

After years of fragmented Windows versions they finally made the one true merged OS that they had been praising for so long. Windows 2000 was really one OS to rule them all.

But as soon as XP came out they invented a home edition, a professional edition, delayed the server and splitted up again. Why? And now this.

It seems it's really all about the money. Sad, in a way. Since, other than with Unix, the most exploits still work cross Windows platform. :)

I want the 10% edition

[sane?]

I'm sick of the MS marketing department trying to hold hostage key bits of functionality to make new versions at higher prices.

In an age of freely available OS, and the threat that Google will pose with their eventual OS, I want the Windows 10% version - which is guaranteed to cost only 10% of the cost of the system hardware (one off fee). You get, and can use, whatever functionality you want.

That would ensure that the Windows tax was affordable, and its simple to implement as well.

Re:Let's see the spin on this one...

[LexNaturalis]

You're missing the blind Microsoft hatred. It reminds me of elementary school when kid A makes fun of kid B for wearing a shirt that's "stupid", then wears the same shirt the next day. If Microsoft were to release a form of BSD/Linux/[Open Source OS], people would complain about that.

I am glad to notes that most of the comments so far, though, have called Dvorak on his idiocy. Seems not even /. has succumbed fully to lunacy.

Pricing

[lspd]

With news of there being 7 Vista editions...

There will be more than 7. This doesn't factor in the versions tailored to other nations. Microsoft is just working out the details of an effective price discrimination scheme.

Who's planning on migrating to Vista anyway?

[xtal]

Nobody I am currently working with has any plans whatsoever to migrate to Vista; most are still in the motions of moving to XP, if they even went that far. I'm not sure what huge features Vista is supposed to offer people, but I believe Microsoft may have themselves a real problem there.

Fragmenting it doesn't seem like a great strategy.

I wouldn't mind a gamer edition.

[sTalking_Goat]

something stripped down, zero flash and optimized for games, it could even be CLI to actually launch the games. It's all I use XP for anyway...

Microsoft is the least of the 3 evils.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is par for the course as far as American corporations go. Microsoft management has screwed American workers and tried to create a monopoly.

Yet, there are 2 worse evils: Google and Yahoo!. Google has assisted the Chinese government in banning certain phrases from its search engine. Yahoo!, lead by the pro-Beijing Jerry Yang (founder of the company), has even assisted the Chinese "police" in finding a reporter and imprisoning him for 10 years for the crime of revealing "state secrets".

I now set Microsoft search as the default search engine on my FireFox browser.

Please don't feed the Dvorak

[WillAffleckUW]

everytime we slashdot him, his salary goes up and he can then pronounce that Linux is dead in his next article.

sigh.

even if he is right about the silly multi-version Vista variants from Microsoft.

Already done!

[realityfighter]

Let's not overlook Microsoft Vista--Kitchen Edition. People are putting computers in the kitchen, aren't they? Well then there should be a rugged kitchen edition with a file system specifically suited to storing recipes and videos of Jacques Pepin cooking his way.

At Frys, they sell a refrigerator with a computer built in to bring up recipes, check your email, etc. I believe you can also use it to keep track of your groceries. It runs Windows XP.

Re:Good informative link

[Trepalium]

One of Microsoft's prime arguments for why they were not a monopoly during their anti-trust trial was because they "haven't raised prices on Windows". These editions are merely Microsoft's way of "not raising prices" by creating "new" products with inflated prices. Strictly speaking, it's completely true. The price of Windows has not increased, but that doesn't mean that people are not paying more to purchase Windows today.

Microsoft's customers have felt the sting from their pocketbooks. They know how much it hurt when Microsoft forced them to upgrade to Windows 2000 over Windows 9x when Microsoft chose to cripple Windows Me. You'll note that few new features are making it into the baseline home and pro versions of the OS, so if you want the new features, you need to shell out more money for the SBS or Enterprise editions.

On the other hand, Microsoft may need to look closely at their processor licensing in the new Windows. Dual-core chips are becoming more and more common, and it's not unreasonable that they'll start showing up in home user machines in the not-too-distant future. XP Home doesn't not appear to support multiprocessor, so hopefully this trend does not carry over into the Vista home products (although I will not be surprised if it does).