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Vista To XP Upgrade Triples In Price, Now $150
ozmanjusri writes "Dell has tripled the charge to upgrade Vista PCs to XP. Under current licensing 'downgrade' agreements, system builders can install XP Pro instead of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate; however, Dell has opted for a surcharge of $150 over the price of Vista for the older but more popular XP Professional operating system. Rob Enderle says the downgrade fees could potentially be disastrous for Microsoft: 'The fix for this should be to focus like lasers on demand generation for Vista but instead Microsoft is focusing aggressively on financial penalties," says Enderle. 'Forcing customers to go someplace they don't want to go by raising prices is a Christmas present for Apple and those that are positioning Linux on the desktop.'"
This won't really apply to home users but for corporate and office users they will not pay $150 to downgrade to XP when they can use the restore WinXP SP3 CD that came with the prior PCs. Long as the PCs have a license sticker on the machine such as Vista or higher they have the right to downgrade for free.
Dell is just milking everybody much as they can and it's wrong. Makes me wonder if this is even legal?
I don't get it either. Why anyone in the consumer space would want to use XP over Vista is beyond me at this point.
At this point I have been using Vista for over a year. Anytime I have to go back and use XP it feels like an out-dated system. For one, the lack of an integrated desktop search client is a huge productivity loss. It's like using a Mac without Spotlight, who really wants to do that anymore?
Secondly, desktop composition in Vista also vastly improves the windows switcher by providing live previews of the windows instead of undescriptive application icons.
Overall I find Vista to be a huge step forward in usability over XP.
I play mostly old games: GTA2, Diablo II, Sim City 2000, Age of Empires II... They're the only reason I kept Windows installed. Vista breaks most of them. I have better support from WINE.
When Vista was first release, I had a client that used an industry specific billing/accounting/inventory management system for the health care industry. Granted I had been working with them for about 6 months and the software vendor warned them "WILL NOT WORK IN VISTA". I kept pressuring them to buy their workstations before the switch over. They wanted to go through Dell, that was the hardware vendor the software company recommended and why rock the boat, especially since they have to deal with said vendor long term.
At any rate, I warned them that on Jan 31st they wouldn't be able to buy PC's with XP loaded from Dell. Honestly, I think they thought I was lying or making it up. This was a small business less than 10 employees who were waiting for a big public aid check to come in. (80% of their business is public aid, and they get paid it's always a matter of when). I even told them in December to put the workstation purchases on the company credit card or go to the bank and get a 180 day short term note, but just buy the workstations before the switch over.
I finished up the disaster recovery plan and all the work I had been hired for about the middle of Jan. I told them again to buy the workstations then. But long story short, I got a phone call in March saying, "We can't buy XP from DELL, so we had to buy vista and the software won't work". I was working on another project 500 miles away and answered bluntly in six words: "Don't say I didn't warn you."
The software vendor flew down some engineers and the company got the luxury of spending $16k to be the beta testers for their Vista version of the software. Apparently it was July before they had all the kinks worked out.
I heard this story repeated several times with various in house or specialty applications in the early days. Especially in small businesses where suddenly, on of their cheap office PC's broke and they had to run out and buy a replacement, and all they could find was machines with Vista that couldn't run their software. It wasn't until the summer that MS allowed the option to pre-install XP again on machines.
Today, it's not that bad, but at launch, there were some problems.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
It's not Blackmail, it's a business model: Get paid to sell your software and get paid NOT to sell your software.
I suspect at this point there are three problems with vista.
The first is word-of-mouth. Vista is bad because everyone says so. This started out as an informed opinion among IT people playing with Vista before SP1 and seeing that it was clearly slower then XP and with some sudden problems (like stalling of file copies and way too many UAC prompts and very few drivers). Many of those issues were fixed, but by then the informed opinion of people who know what they're talking about had been spread to people who like to think they're in the first group. These people eventually tried windows, probably poorly configured and certainly with cynical expectations, and naturally found instances of all the problems they were told about. Then, regardless of if these issues were reduced or even removed the opinion that vista was bad gets spread to the average user. They probably never try it at all, but just listen to the local guy who knows how to install things and open word without help. Basically... there were issues, and people told about these issues will continue to see them no matter how thoroughly they were fixed, because that's how expectations work.
The second issue is... the lack of obvious improvements. Ok, Vista's security model is better then XP's. It probably has some back-end improvements, and the move to 64-bit standard lays the groundwork for more theoretical improvement down the road. But does it run faster then XP? Is the user interface, to someone who's been using previous versions of windows all their life, easier to use then XP's? Is it easier to preform common tasks? No. Vista uses more resources then XP and on low-end PC's XP is way faster. Vista makes big changes to user interface, and while they're probably better for the long run, a long-time PC user will be lost when they first see Vista's UI... and may decide then and there that XP's was better. They'll try to open word, type something, and print it and find it takes twice as long on Vista. Maybe they'd eventually learn to do it faster in Vista then they did in XP, but by then they've already bought their downgrade rights and never looked back.
Finally, people are starting to get pissed off that they're being *forced* to an OS they don't want to use. Making DirectX 10 Vista only was a shitty thing to do to customers. All the talk about DRM and how they'll need all new everything from cables to televisions to watch "premium content" put people off, regardless of truth. And most of all, telling people that to use XP they'll have to buy Vista and then pay more isn't exactly endearing. People who want to use Linux have known for years how hard it is to get a standard, mass produced PC without paying for windows... and now for the first time people who want XP are finding that they can't just get an XP CD out of a bargin bin and get a computer without an OS. It's Vista or... Vista. Not even Vista or nothing.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
The only thing it would persuade me to do is pop over to The Pirate Bay.
If I've already paid Microsoft for an operating system then I'm not going to feel the tiniest twinge of guilt about downloading the one I really wanted.
Even if I haven't paid, stuff like this doesn't generate much sympathy. I'm more likely to think that a lot of people have paid twice so all I'm doing is "dumpster diving" for the unused copies.
No sig today...