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MS Trying To Spur Vista Sales With Discounts

Posted by kdawson on from the wee-mite-desperate dept.

Ang writes "Is Microsoft having worries about selling Vista already? Ars reports that Microsoft has announced yet another 'discount program' for Vista, but these new discounts work out to only about 10% off list price — not much when you notice that retailers already sell Vista below list. To make matters worse, the discount program would still end up costing you $100 more than the older 'family' discount built around Vista Ultimate in some situations. Ars spends seven paragraphs explaining this convoluted offer. Is all of this complexity supposed to help sell Vista?" If you must buy Vista, it might be advisable to sit on your wallet for a while. The discounts are bound to get sweeter.

3 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. Discount? by blankoboy · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Never mind the discount. If you want me to be Vista and run it on my home PC please get rid of the WGA and arcane DRM crud. Then I might consider installing your shiny new OS.

    Then again, if Steve Jobs were to beat you to the punch and "officially" support OSX on standard x86 PC's you could kiss my $$ goodbye forever Micrsoft! Sadly, this is not likely to happen anytime soon.

  2. Re:Poor drivers with Vista by blackicye · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Whom should we believe - you or a BBC reporter?

    You: I've not had any hardware incompatibilities so far but YMMV. The closest I've gotten to driver incompatibilities was one of the motherboards had an onboard Creative SB Live 5.1 chip. But a visit to Creative's website solved that, though it took some digging.

    BBC reporter:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6407419.stm Me, any day of the week, over some n00b reporter, thanks for asking though.

    I clearly stated it was an onboard SB Live 5.1 chip. If you had even cared to check before trolling, you would have turned up this link to the drivers:
    Here if you can be bothered now, look. Or more likely just proceed with your sarcasm and baseless cynicism. Its not like I said it was perfect, I said it didn't have driver issues.

    Besides, did you even read the BBC article?

    "When I bought it, my Dell Dimension 8200 was fairly state-of-the-art (a few stats for the experts: Pentium 4 processor running at 2GHz, 384MB of RAM, a 64MB graphics card, and a Creative SB Live audio card)." If you expect to run Vista on a 2+ year old Dell with 384mb ram and a 64mb graphics card, you need to take a reality check, admittedly its within the specs listed on the Vista box, but when was the last time you bought games, applications or a Microsoft OS that performed decently at minimum or even recommended specs?
  3. Gap Trying To Spur Shirt Sales With Discounts by paulerdos · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Is Gap having worries about selling shirts already? Ars reports that Gap has announced yet another 'discount program' for shirts, but these new discounts work out to only about 10% off list price -- not much when you notice that retailers already sell shirts below list. To make matters worse, the discount program would still end up costing you $100 more than the older 'family' discount built around Really Nice Shirts in some situations. Ars spends seven paragraphs explaining this convoluted offer. Is all of this complexity supposed to help sell shirts?

    If you must buy a shirt, it might be advisable to sit on your wallet for a while. The discounts are bound to get sweeter.