Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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!
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.