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.

Comments

Keep on waiting...

[Junior J. Junior III]

Not buying Vista at all, ever, will save you the most money in the long run. Not to mention aggravation.

Re:Keep on waiting...

[Seumas]

Not buying Vista at all, ever, will save you the most money in the long run. Not to mention aggravation. Getting most videogames - say Crysis - to run in linux is pretty fucking aggravating.

Between OEMs putting it on all new systems and people opting for it on their home-builds once games start making use of DirectX 10, Vista will rule the market just like XP, 2000, 98, 95, etc have.

It really sucks having to have a special OS just to play videogames.

Oh well.

Re:Keep on waiting...

[Moridineas]

omfg are you kidding??

Did you ever game in DOS? In Windows 3.1? I guess you don't remember fiddling with your config.sys, messing around with the amounts and types of memory--EMS, XMS, conventional, etc? Do you not remember having to manually change screen resolution and color in windows 3.1 depending on the program? Fiddling with soundcard settings and environmental variables to get the IRQ/DMA/etc all nice and working with said game?

Not to mention, you had to install games for ANY of those operating systems--more so since DOS games usually were on floppies that had compressed files spread across multiple disks.

Geez, talk about rose tinted forgetting glasses!

Why ?

[billcopc]

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.

Good deals for retailers

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Unlike "real goods" which cost "real money" to make, a Vista product (ie. DVD + packaging) costs virtually nothing. No doubt MS is running sweet deals for retailers to get as many sales as possible.

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?