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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.
Last couple of times I've visited Costco there have been huge and nearly full Vista racks. It's pretty early in a product cycle for Vista to be in Costco... let alone in Costco and not moving.
Microsoft makes most of its money through its OEM deals. I believe the number bandied about is that 80% of its Windows revenue comes not directly from the consumer, but from the "Microsoft tax" on nearly all computers sold. Also, the price MS charges OEMs for Windows is already a lot lower than that charged for an off-the-shelf version. A lot of Microsoft's revenue also depends on businesses and government, not consumers. These "discounts" seem more like the fevered imaginings of a marketing drone who wants to make Windows seem like a "sweet deal". It may not even be a ploy to make more sales in the consumer section, it might be just another trick to increase awareness of the Vista brand; nothing makes consumers perk up their ears like the word "discount", even if they are ultimately not interested in a new operating system.
I think some of the negativity comes from being asked to spend $200 on a big thing that is so complex it requires me to upgrade my computer, and it does pretty much exactly what my current thing does. Not to mention that it will probably have an unknown (But larger than zero) amount of DRM and snooping software woven throughout.
For instance, here is a basic list of the applications I use regularly:
Firefox
Office XP
Notepad
DevC++
ZSNES
MathCAD
Games purchased before 2005
Winamp
Cakewalk Recording Studio
FruityLoops
And here is a list of applications I won't be able to use without Vista:
Games made after 2008
Is that it doesn't play nicely with AD domains. I know, we tried it and it failed miserably. Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one. I mean, even 2000 and XP could connect to both standard NT domains and AD domains. But Vista has issues, even going so far as completely screwing up the network settings. And friends in the market for a laptop are begging me to downgrade their machines to XP because critical applications they use will NOT run on Vista.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Reason #189 not to shop at CompUSA.
Reason #188 was their restocking policy, if you buy a defective device and they don't have the exact same one on the shelf, they charge you 15% to change to another brand or model. Such a nice company... (gag)
Seriously CompUSA has become the laughing stock of consumer tech PC industry. If your techs had more background or training, this would not be their response to people, the driver issues would be something they would know the workarounds to, and people getting 10-15fps on and AMD 4000+ is irrelevant, the GPU is what makes or breaks a games performance. So when you are selling systems with on board Geforce 1150 Video, or Intel 945G chipsets, it doesn't matter if they are in XP or Vista, Video performance is going to suck in games. PERIOD.
In our labs any Geforce 5200 or ATI 9600 or higher system do great under Vista and with the latest drivers in almost EVERY game out perform XP 5-10%, let alone the speed increases in multi-tasking the games and load times. Here is the trick, to beat XP performance, the system need 1GB of RAM. PERIOD. This is not a huge jump, as 90% of gamers have had 1GB in their systems for a couple of years now.
So considering that a Geforce 5600 and ATI 9600 are SEVERAL years old and AT THE BOTTOM of what is required for 99% of games made since 2002, there is no reason that people should continue to believe Vista takes high end hardware for good graphics and YES all the Glass Eye Candy.
Vista with only 512mb will run as fast as XP for general business applications, games being the exception since most games load in at 700-800mb...
If people are serious about Vista and don't know where to start, even freaking BestBuy has a track record with trained personnel for the Vista launch. They have the tech teams that usually have the 'right' answers and even their PC sales teams understand Vista enough to answer most people's questions on why Vista is better beyond common marketing hype.
I installed a free copy of Vista I got from Dell about 2 weeks ago as well, and immediately uninstalled it. I had made an image of my hard drive pre-upgrade with Norton Ghost so it was pretty easy to do so. I was actually pretty excited about Vista, and ended up being disappointed. My primary complaints include (there may have been more but I uninstalled too quickly to find them):
- they eliminated the expanding "All Programs" menu from the Start menu (wtf?), so instead you have to scroll up and down interminably on a little window in the Start menu. Think of it like using Start on your Blackberry. It's either that or use search to find your program.
- 10,000 shades of teal mixed with an unchangeable grey/black/silver Taskbar / Start menu = extreme nausea, plus there is no way to change it.
- Flip 3D is not useful because you have to use either a 3-key combo to use it or click on a little button on the taskbar to use it. I would have preferred just using my mouse scrollwheel...
- The "User Access Control" thing warned me 3 times in a row about WinRAR and I couldn't just approve the program...
- The start button is a lot harder to click on now since it's not synonymous with the corner - you have to visually find it.
I really liked IE until they screwed everything up in IE7, and now I've started using Firefox. I am wondering whether Vista will do the same thing and force me to start using a Mac and/or Linux. Linux still isn't an option though because the media copyright issues make it hard to use for multimedia applications. And a Mac screams "vendor lock-in". So maybe I'll just use XP forever...
I couldn't help thinking about what $5 billion would buy in the software world. It's hard to compare graphics softwares and OSs but look at it this way you could buy most of the major CG software companies for that and probably pick up some choice 2D software companies to boot. That's a lot of complex software. Was the Vista upgrade worth $5 billion? If I was a shareholder I'd be pissed and want some one to explain. Mac is pulling off more innovative OS upgrades almost on a yearly basis for a tiny fraction of the cost. As a stockholder I'd want some heads to roll because all that wasted money could have gone to paying dividends instead of fat bonuses for a questionable upgrade. Microsoft's primary assest is market share which is formitable but can it last if they don't do better with future upgrades? Vista is a marginal upgrade for the user to XP so in a sense they are five years behind where they should be in development. Investors and customers may let them slide on this one but if the next upgrade doesn't look much better they will have a lot of explaining to do since Mac and Linux are constantly upgrading during the overly long Windows development cycle.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Titus Barik
Yes. However the difference here is once you fiddled around with it and found how to get it working, it worked perfectly fine (or most did).
I currently run Linux, and while attempts have been made to make it easier to play games, it is STILL not a gaming system. It will NEVER be a system you can game on really until you get buy in support from the game designers and they start making games FOR Linux.
Games in Linux for me fall into 4 categories: A) Doesn't work, not supported. B) The fix to actually get it working is so convouluted and difficult that it might be easier to design your own OS and get the game working on that first. C) The game works, however, there are significant problems as somethings do not work, or if you do certain things it will crash, or it will just crash seemingly randomly. D) The game works, however because you are basically emulating windows the proformance is horrible.
Thats pretty much as good as it gets as far as my experiance goes.
I am currently looking to built a new system next month. After much thought, I have decided to bite the bullet and just buy Vista. Linux can't do it. OSX can't do it. I refuse to go back and buy old technology in XP. I want my games. Computer games, NOT console games. I had an Xbox, and the while fun, the experiance is not the same, the main thing is the types of games that are released and the quality of online play. I have friends that have the Wii, it is a fun party type console, but doesn't do it for me as a stand alone system. Xbox basically made mostly sport and driving games, very little strategy or RPG or anything like that, mostly the only thing playable was FPS, however my main interest in those are for online play, and well Live is full of young kids being stupid basically. I don't have an HD TV either, making Xbox360 underutilized and thus not worth the upgrade, other than they stopped making games for the xbox it seems. The PS3 is very expensive and seems by all accounts that it may not be that successful.
Thus Vista is really the only alternative, though a crappy one initally anyway. However this is Microsofts buisness plan and how they make their billions, by being the only real game in town, and having no real compitition. This is why the monoply sucks, as they can come out with garbage like Vista, but consumers really have little choice but to bend over and take it. Even a little compitition would be nice, look at all the great things AMD and Intel are doing! Ah, anyway this somehow turned into a rant... oh well, my 2 cents I guess.
DarthVain