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MS Trying To Spur Vista Sales With Discounts
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.
Not buying Vista at all, ever, will save you the most money in the long run. Not to mention aggravation.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Tom Peterson says "Free is a very good price!".
And I agree.
At this point, I have no interest in paying for Windows. I do, however, require at least one Windows box (currently XP64) for gaming and testing deployment of some of our enterprise applications at home. I also don't really care to go through the trouble of finding a viable crack on bit torrent or anything. I will probably buy it once there are games which I must have that demand DirectX10 for the coolest gaming experience -- and I will do so when I am in the process of building a new machine so that I can get the OEM version.
Even at that, I will not spend $200. I might spend $140. And that's for the full version (4gb+, multi-core, 64bit, etc). Otherwise they can just eat it. The only reason I ever need to jump off my solaris, debian or OSX boxes is to play games. Period.
I still don't quite understand why people would rush to get Vista. XP works the same if not better, there's actually mature driver support (well, mature is a relative term when talking about ATI, NVidia et al), and you know the software you need works on XP. This reminds me of over a decade ago when we all rushed to get Windows 95 the day it came out, only to pummel our PC's into dust with all the problems it caused. Printers no longer printing, internet dialer no longer dialing, and of course the joys of our old 16-bit apps crashing half the time. It was painful. I ended up dual-booting back to classic Dos + Wfw311 for a while longer while the dust settled. Vista is going to be the same story... give it a year, for most users it will have stabilized and 3rd party support will be established. Right now it doesn't even know which end to poop from.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
... is that I switched to Vista about 2 weeks ago and am loving it. Despite all the negativity people seem to have about it I find most of that negativity comes from people who have never installed it or used it.
Apart from generating revenue, MS has to prove to share holders that the $5bn that was spent on Vista development was worth doing and they can only do that by showing an increase in sales vs XP. There must be a lot of shareholders wondering whether it would have been better to just put the money in the bank and ride XP for longer. After all, anyone not buying Vista would still buy XP, so what motivates spending $5bn?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Is Microsoft having worries about selling Vista already?
Yeh, sure...Microsoft is crying all the way to the bank.
Is this that slow of a news day?
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Microsoft makes most of its money through its OEM deals.
.sig line. If M$ can't legally bundle its buggy bloatware, it will either have to create/buy good software, or go under. I don't quite hate M$ the way some folks do, although I think it has never done anything technologically innovative worth mentioning. M$ just needs a massive kick in the ass to get it in gear and shift its direction. Despite Google snagging the cream of the IT/CS crop these days, MS has some very impressive capabilities...ones it has no motivation to use as long as it can fall back on its monopoly position to generate big bucks.
See my
IBM went through the kind of humbling process I am talking about. IBM is no longer the "environment" where computing is concerned, but it has been the source of funding for great pure research and incredible development efforts for decades. With a little "spanking" from the courts, I think M$ might become a good, yet still very profitable, corporate citizen.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
You have Vista Home, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate.
IMO, Vista Enterprise shouldn't exist with the bitlocker and other "enterprise" features being either made available in Vista Business or as some kind of add-on.
The "N" versions need to exist to comply with anti-trust rulings and really are just the normal versions with windows media player files removed from the CD/DVD
and the installer.
That would basically leave 4 editions of vista, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate
I laughed at those racks because whoever attempts to purchase and install those, unless they just bought a brand new machine (in which case it would come with Vista installed by default anyway), they are going to most likely have hardware incompatibilities, lack of driver support, etc and thus be unhappy and return the product. Too many returns will eventually cause retailers to stop carrying them on the shelves.
But this isn't too much of a concern for Microsoft since they only accounted for 10% of XP's sales. However since Vista is not selling anywhere near as well as XP, I'm willing to bet they wish that they were selling well at this point and that they had put a little more focus into this segment of the market.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
the only way id install vista on a system is vista provide any equipment needed to upgrade my computer to current status. (no im not on a Radioshack color computer with a 300 baud modem) but the waste of space by the huge bulk of code may make it easy for a newbie to use a computer but why buy a hyper code stystem that is Apple OS the long way around??
The Windows Classic 9X I would market towards the low end, people with older systems who cannot run modern operating systems
I hope at least in your own mind you were trying to be funny.
The Win9x code base with no security and roots to 3.1 and DOS is why developers have screwed up many applications still in use on XP.
Also consider XP runs well on 80MB and a 200mhz processor (faster than Win95 or Win98 did), it is time to let these computers die, as most Linux distributions won't even run on them.
I think a major reason that Vista isn't flying off the shelves like XP did is because people don't NEED Vista. XP works just fine. Windows 2000/me, however, was a terribly mangled and unstable peice of software. XP, in my experience, has been remarkably stable.
ME, on the other hand, which I was running before XP... well... There was definitely a sense of urgency in switching to XP.
If you were using ME then yea, I can see your urgency...
I was using 2000 (as in w2k), and I was highly reluctant in upgrading to XP.
I never did, on my own.
It was an invoulentary upgrade, it came with the boxes, basically.
Then there's the whole thing about it being stopped support-wise, by microsoft.
So... my 'incentive', for going 2k->XP, was force and fear. That's all it was.
A rational person would draw the opposite conclusion: that they're confident in Vista sales numbers....
Microsoft seems confident that there are enough irrational people in the world to boost demand for an inferior, bloated product that lacks many promised features and requires 8 times more hardware to perform essentially the same functions.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....