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

Costco...

[podperson]

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.

wtf kind of writeup is this?

[User 956]

Is Microsoft having worries about selling Vista already? ... To make matters worse, the discount program would still end up costing you $100 more than the older 'family' discount

Ok, then they're not worried about selling Vista, if the new discount program is worse than the old discount program. A rational person would draw the opposite conclusion: that they're confident in Vista sales numbers. At least, enough to reduce the incentive.

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...

[aussie_a]

If someone designed a computer/OS that allowed you to just throw a game CD/DVD in, no installing or drivers and just turn on the computer and play it, I would be all over that like a bad rash.

If only there was a computer like that, if only.....

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!

Re:Keep on waiting...

[Lumpy]

Hey I always though that was the first level to the game... To see if your IQ was high enough, prove to us your mad skillz with emm386 and driver loading order.

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.

Yeah, but...

[Null Nihils]

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.

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?

Re:Good deals for retailers

[edwardpickman]

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.

The Only problem

[kilodelta]

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.

Joel's advice

[Erbo]

I'm sticking with Joel Spolsky's advice, from this column:

• Do NOT, under any circumstances, upgrade an existing XP machine to Vista, even if it's Vista Supremo Premium Ultra-Capable.
• When you get a new computer, if it comes with Vista, that's when you'll upgrade.
• Do NOT buy a new computer just to get Vista, if your existing XP-based machine is working well enough.

Of course, Microsoft probably doesn't want me saying that...but screw 'em.

OS X performance does increase with each iteration

[iendedi]

The main reason I'd avoid Vista is the price and the loss in performance, though no new OS generally increases performance on the same hardware Apple's OS X operating system performs better with each iteration, on the same hardware. The rumor is that Apple achieves this remarkable result through a little known, and apparently forgotten, exercise called "optimization". Apparently, this activity is something that ancient computer-scientists used to do, according to some archeologists, but the ancient art of optimization was abandoned sometime during the Microsoft dark-ages.

Many people dismiss this topic of optimization as a conspiracy theory, but I must admit that I am starting to believe that such techniques exist.