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MS Offers Vista Upgrade Pricing To All
SlinkySausage writes "With a vague whiff of desperation, Microsoft is offering anyone who downloaded one of the betas or release candidates of Vista upgrade pricing for the full version. The 'special' deal is a sweetener for the fact that the betas will start expiring and becoming non-functional from May 31st. APC Magazine in Australia writes: 'Windows Vista is starting to look like those Persian rug stores which are always having a "closing down" sale... All stock has been slashed, save $$$, why pay more?'" Perhaps Microsoft is cognizant of straws in the wind such as a recent InformationWeek survey indicating that 30% of business have no intention of moving to Vista, ever.
I wonder how much MS really makes off Windows, particularly at the consumer level, in terms of profit per unit. It's easy to see in some business lines where the profit really is (ink jet printers versus cartridge refills, concessions versus ticket prices at theaters, etc.), but it's a little blurry in software. It probably makes good business sense for MS to lower the price on their OS by $100 or so per unit and make it up in other lines of business. 'Course, I still won't upgrade until I get more or less forced into it because of DirectX 10 (damn you, gaming addiction!), but it might get them more actual sales.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I remember there were a lot of naysayers regarding Windows XP, back when it was introduced, but WinXP did well, in spite of the fact that Win2K already had what companies needed. Probably because WinXP at least wasn't a huge downgrade, compared to Win2K.
Not so with Vista. My impression is that is't a downgrade. What with the stupidly slow file copy problem, the increased hardware requirements (even if you disregard the graphics card), the DRM, the need for (some) staff re-training... This time the anti-momentum is stronger than with XP.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
From what I've heard the major problem with Vista is that it was designed by committee with dozens of people involved in even the most minute aspects. The problem with that of course being that that more people = more compromise and a compromise is, from one viewpoint, simply a solution that leaves everyone equally unhappy. From my testing of Vista and reading the various feedback threads, I think that's been an excellent tagline for Vista thus far...the OS that will leave everyone equally unhappy with it.
The culture at Redmond simply looks like it's gotten so insulated from this "reality" thing that they're sliding into a world where they don't understand that most people do not like the OS. The OS is a required evil to get to what they actually want, which is the applications. The faster the OS gets to those applications and gets the hell out of the way, the better...for most users at any rate. Why this concept seems to elude OS designers is beyond me, but Microsoft needs to come to terms with the idea that when I sit down at a computer to check my email, I want to use my email program, not the OS. If I want to play a game, I want to play the game...not work with the OS. If I need to write something, I want to write...not deal with the OS. It's quite simple really, which is probably why they don't get it.
The question is, what will replace it?
With projects line Wine and Mono, hopefully 5 years is enough time to eliminate all MS XP/Vista dependence for their home-grown apps.
At that point they can choose a vendor-supported OS based on price and the quality of the vendor, not vendor lock-in.
Within 5 years companies will want their OSes to be portable across hardware. If a generic-box-PC fails they'll want to take their HD out of the failing generic-PC box and put it in another generic-box-PC which may have a completely different CPU and motherboard. If you try that today with XP you run all kinds of risks and it might not even boot. In 5 years companies will use OSes that can tolerate this or put them into a "thin-layer" VM environment to make all their generic-box-PCs look identical enough to eliminate this problem. Think Southwest Airlines and the way they "dumb down" their newer 737s so the entire fleet "looks identical" to their pilots.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think one of Microsoft's big problems has they have overpriced the boxed versions of Vista. It is a crazy state of affairs when my local computer shop is selling complete PCs cheaper than the boxed versions of Vista.
When slightly used will do? This is the mantra of a local exercise equipment dealer here. You save a lot of money that way.
In the computer world, the question is Why buy the operating system, when you can get a new capable computer?
Amazon is listing Windows Vista Home Premium for $218, slightly less than the US$239 retail. For another $300 you can get a fully capable PC with it with 1GB of RAM and a suitable video card to get a 3.0 on the performance scale.
This particular market is skewed at moving PCs, not selling operating systems.
Have you Meta Moderated t
The retraining and hardware requirements were the exact excuses I used to start brining Linux into my offices, one computer at a time. We don't have any special software or anything (just Firefox and Microsoft Office, which I am gradually replacing with OOo). Instead of paying $1200 for a decent office computer that can run Vista smoothly, I can pay $600 for a computer with Linux compatible hardware and know I won't have to upgrade for a good long time. The training is going much smoother than I anticipated, actually, and thus far, I've had several employees ask if I could help them run Linux at home (pointed them at the local Linux users group, naturally).
Why buy expensive hardware and retrain everyone after paying over a thousand dollars per seat (Vista + Office) when you can buy a cheaper, more reliable computer? And the best part of the deal? All those shitty downloadable Windows "games" can't be installed!
It would be interesting to see what percentage of Vista sales were for 'Vista Home Basic' (i.e. the bare minimum default MS OS that vendors put on new boxes). It would be more interesting to know what percentage of those boxes get wiped and have XP or Linux installed on them.
[Insert pithy quote here]
the stupidly slow file copy problem
I am going to go out on a limb and theorize that this "bug" is a deliberate act. It reminds me of IBM in the mainframe/terminal days, where they added delays to ensure that response time was always 2 seconds. And for average users it is good to have average response times -- if you give them a fast one for some things and a slow one for others, they will notice and whine.
In this case I think something much more potentially sinister is at work. Vista has introduced a "copy lag" that can later on (once we have all accepted the lag) be used to scan files for 1) malware, 2) DRM reasons, 3) do other things we don't want Vista to do.
Saying that I wouldn't put it past them is an understatement.
I come here for the love
Thanks to virtual machine technology, we will never truly have to upgrade for hardware reasons. As long as some other OS supports the hardware, we can run Windows XP in the VM.
Just think of how long Windows 98 has stuck around, despite the lack of new drivers and software support. And now with VMs, we could probably keep running it, and see it run quite fact actually compared to the hardware of its day (especially once 3D accelleration is added to VMs).
I think the upgrade path for those wanting to stay on Windows XP could be a move to Mac OS X with Parallels, or Linux with Parallels/VMware/etc. Or possibly even just Windows XP runnning on top of a thin OS layer that provides just the VM.
Though it is the lack of software support that will eventually get you, if you care about security patches and suport contracts. Though a large amount of new software still works on Windows 98 even today, I'm not sure that it has a supported browser anymore, now that Firefox will require 2K/XP or later. It still is handy for a VM though - a single user OS like Win98 that doesn't have a lot of network services is actually not that insecure when it is just a VM inside a real OS.
I think WinXP isn't quite as suited for that sort of task right now, but there is a lot of development work going into XP and VMs, so we could see XP hand on even longer than 98 has.