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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
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.
Funny.... not a single tech where I work thinks it's worth upgrading except to play with and learn to fulfill our job duties. We use it all the time. We field tons of questions that end up being answered with "Sorry you just bought a machine with Vista on it. Now you have to wait for the compatible ___________ (driver/app/game patch) to run that ___________ (piece of hardware/app/game)". We have a ton of HP laptops that dont even have proper webcam support in Vista - even though the webcam is built in to the machine. We have lots of multi-function "Vista Ready" printers that only print on Vista... no scan, no fax via computer, no reading from the card readers built into them. We have numerous machines with the most horrendous video support imaginable - right out of the box. The "lower end" systems running the Vista Demo video are getting 5-10 frames per second... and by lower end, I mean AMD 4000+ and similar speed Intels, with what otherwise would be at least mid-range or decent video chipsets. We have people coming in all the time asking why WoW (and dozens of other games) doesnt run properly, or does weird things. Or why Sleep/Suspend/Hibernate does weird things. Or why so many "Vista Capable"/"Vista Ready" pieces of hardware or software dont run or run poorly.
As for sales slumping... well, at the CompUSA we work at, we didnt start to move Vista until recently - and I think that was due to two factors (1) we sold out of XP finally and (2) since we are a closing store, we are discounting it by 15%. Yes, they are finally selling, but still at a snails pace... a handful before this change happened has become two handfuls now. Anyone wants to buy a copy or three, come on in, we have TONS still. And they are discounted 15% at my store at the least - if not in all the closing stores (some may even have higher discounts already). Our Mac sales, oddly, have tripled - we are near out of them (and they are more expensive and barely discounted at all), but have tons of Vista machines, and people coming in to buy every last XP machine we have (only thing left are some Systemax boxes that no one seems too keen on buying... anything else with XP RAN out the door rather quickly).
Robert
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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
How does one persons random opinion with no surrounding discussion get modded insightful?
Here, I'll give you my opinion too:
I have installed it and I have used it, and I hated it.
Well, I guess you're going to have to toss a coin on who to believe...