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Dell Indicates Windows 7 Pricing Will Be Higher
ausekilis sends us word that a Dell spokesman said, without giving numbers, that Windows 7 pricing will be higher than Vista's or XP's. "Windows 7 pricing is potentially an obstacle to Windows 7 adoption for some users, though in just about every other aspect the operating system is beating Vista, according to a Dell marketing executive. ... [Darrell] Ward continued, 'In tough economic times, I think it's naive to believe that you can increase your prices on average and then still see a stronger swell than if you held prices flat or even lowered them. I can tell you that the licensing tiers at retail are more expensive than they were for Vista. ... Schools and government agencies may not be able to afford (the additional cost). Some of the smaller businesses may not be able to enjoy the software as soon as they'd like,' Ward said.'"
they need to demonstrate to investors that they are indeed a money making business that will continue to make a lot of money in the future. Regardless of their cash position, if the investors leave, who already got shaky feelings from vista, then the market cap of the whole company goes down and ballmer will go looking for a job.
Now whether higher prices will help them make their sales goals, that's yet to be seen. In the short term, perhaps yes, with all the built in sales to the OEMs. In the long term, I bet the retail sales trail the oem sales for a while, so this might have been a pretty good plan overall anyways.
How much will it cost to get a copy of XP from Dell when 7 is released?
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I don't get it. My theory of Vista as an expectation lowering decoy gets more and more plausible.
Perhaps Linux PCs should also come with preinstalled advertising to help reduce the price? Let's see: FREE OS minus $200 == a really cheap computer. (Maybe even a free computer)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If you don't have $150 for an OS X licence, how about $5 to burn a Debian CD-R? Better than leaving it as an electronic paperweight.
I wonder what it's like inside Microsoft's little bubble world? It's as if they're oblivious to everyone and everything outside of it. A recession is on but hey!, lets go ahead and raise the price! I mean, after all everyone hates Vista so they should be kicking Microsoft's door in to have to opportunity to pay more for the next version, right?
Meanwhile I just upgraded my laptop to Jaunty and had it completely setup and configured to my needs in under a half hour. For free. It really makes me rethink the whole idea of upgrading my Vista machine.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
I believe 10 years ago or so there was a project that was called FreePC that would basically give you a fairly decent machine, in exchange for you letting them monitor your surfing habits and always display ads to you.
It didn't work.
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
I wonder if it would be possible for someone like Dell to allow people to choose to have linux and windows pre-installed except leave windows on a 30 day trial. Then people are free to try out linux and see if it suits their needs. If they then decide they need windows, they can purchase a key for activation.
MS's latest move might bear out my theory about why they sold those bonds:
MS sold bonds at a rock bottom price because they know those bonds are going to get massively devalued when inflation goes bonkers over the next couple years.
MS is raising its prices ahead of this (hyper?)inflation scenario so that they can continue to turn a reasonable profit. Once they set the cost there isn't really any going back. Inflate the costs now for the OS that has to sell for at least a few years.
That's my theory.
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In reading these comments, its amazing how many of you actually believe that Dell (or any other top-tier PC maker) pays anything even near retail for any Microsoft OS.
I know for a fact that back in the days before Vista when XP was still king that HP was typically paying Microsoft $35 a copy. I'm sure Dell gets a similar discount, and I'm sure they aren't paying any more than $60 or so a copy now.
In addition, the makers of all that shitware that comes preinstalled on your new PC pays Dell a fee for putting it there. That's another reason that getting Linux on a PC from Dell would not necessarily reduce your price.
This sounds to me like Dell wants to raise prices and increase their margins (which are currently very thin in the PC industry), and this is a cool way to blame it on Microsoft. They simply don't have the balls to say "Dell needs to make more profit".
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
That assumes they'll ever enjoy Windows 7 doesn't it? If they didn't buy into Vista what does this Ward fellow think Windows 7 will have that'll make folks like it? Less expensive hardware requirements? Dream on. Better security? (If it hasn't already been said by someone from Microsoft, I can almost guarantee that you'll soon be hearing that "Windows 7 is the most secure version of Windows to date".) Don't count on that. (I give it less than a month before a major virus/worm makes the rounds of the new Windows 7 systems.) Lower support costs? You're kidding, right?
Seems like some of these analysts already know that Windows 7 is going to be a turkey.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Yes, Dell is not saying it will cost X more per copy, because it will not.
Dell has more of a problem with restrictions on their bundles/spyware they load systems with and the kick backs they will lose with Windows7. Companies like Dell that bloatware their computers are more of a bane to the computing industry than anything MS has even done to harm the industry. PERIOD.
After Vista was released and we deployed a bunch of 'business' class Dell Notebooks, it was freaking insane the amount of Dell support, and 3rd party bloatware we had to stip off the systems.
Dell doesn't like MS we know this, and they make money from this bloatware, but really does this help users, especially when they were selling Vista Business with this crap on it?
And the Home units from Dell are even worse, as they were shipping out 512mb systems with Vista Home for a long time, which is bad enough as Vista really needs 1GB to run as fast as XP, but the bloatware Dell had on the system was consuming almost 260mb of RAM at startup.
No wonder the average consumer was POed and thought Vista sucked. I would have too if I wasn't in the industry and knew better. Which leads to the next point, Dell does have IT people and they DID know better, so why did they do it? Just for the extra kick back bucks at the expense of screwing their own customers.
So here we are again with Dell looking at the Bloatware kick backs they will be losing and going, dang, we have no way to get our crap kick backs, so they are once again speaking out.
It is just like the old anti-trust lawsuit, where Dell was more than willing to put nails into MS on the cross, yet they were the ones that 'opted' for the better conract OEM rates to do exclusive bundles, where lower end OEMs like the one I was at did not, and could sell Window-less systems.
These were 'exclusive' contracts that dated back to the old days of IBM that was still done in the software industry where an OS or piece of software was bundled at a lower rate if it went out on all the systems sold. Dell took the offer and then blamed MS for forcing them to save the 5-10 $ per copy it saved them. (Most of the big OEMs took the offer at the time, as they HAD NO INTENTION of shipping anything but Windows on the systems anyway. Yet when it came time to shove MS on the cross for 'daring' to offer these contracts, these same OEMs wanted more pricing control from MS and did exactly what they threatened and used the contracts against MS that the OEMs had enjoyed for many years. (While also keeps similar contracts with Wordperfect and other companies at the time they were testifying against MS for 'forcing' them to save the 5-10 bucks and do guaranteed bundles. Geesh)
I was with a smaller OEM, we paid about 5-10 $ a copy for Windows over what Gateway,Dell,HP, etc were paying MS, but we got the same levels of support from Microsoft. Microsoft offered us the contract, but we said no, cause we had some OS/2 and UNIX clients (Talking 1991-1999 here), so we paid a few bucks more for Windows, which was still cheaper than OS/2, and cheaper to support than UNIX, and we gave our customers the choice the industry somehow mythically believes didn't exist at this time.
MS didn't force Windows on all the name brand OEM machines, the OEMs did, and they are the ones that screwed people and dominated the market, it just happened they were selling Windows on the systems and designing around the Windows hardware model. -Go Look at 2D acceleration in the 90s, it was all based around Windows drawing and GDI.
Microsoft has already informed OEMs about the addition to more rigourous anti-virus abilities in the existing Win7 'Defender' product that is extending with MS Update to make anti-virus a thing of the past on Windows. This means that the kick back from Norton or McAfee could hurt their per unit sales, and this is just ONE example where Win7 will hurt Dell.
In this example, can you REALLY be POed at MS for tightening security and reliability of their product? Even on SlashDo
Who modded this up?
Let me give you a hint, paperweight status means it doesn't work at all... and that's just one manufacturer. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you aren't a laptop user either. Suspend still doesn't work a significant portion of the time and support for Atheros wireless chipsets has only recently gotten usable, Ralink is average, and Broadcom is still a pile of shit (even with the STA driver.)
Then you've got stuff like Marvell controllers where the Linux driver can either do SATA or PATA, but not both.
2009 called, it wants to know what you've been smoking. Linux hardware support has certainly improved, but it still sucks.
I did not always resent MSFT. In fact as recently as 12 months ago I shelled out more than $300 to install Vista Ultimate 64 bit on my Dell computer. I was eager and excited to get the latest MSFT gadget. The reality was indeed disappointing. What is worse is that MSFT wants to charge me now another $300+ for a bug fix to an OS I already paid for. It's like going to the auto repair shop with your 1 year old Mercedes only to find out that the car is a lemon and that you have to buy a whole new car for the full sticker price. This in the same city were Porsches, Ferraris or Jaguars are free. Thanks but no thanks. I am writing this on my Ubuntu 9.04. I've had no problems installing it, and few problems using it - most of them quickly solved by a quick google search. No more MSFT for me, thank you, I've had plenty.
My point was not about base windows installs, which OEMs haven't used in probably 10 years or more, it's about disk imaging, which OEMs do use. The two are worlds apart.
I know because building and installing images was my job for the last two years. Windows OS installs never have a problem if the drivers are available and accessable. If the drivers aren't available for Linux, well good luck. It's probably not going to be as simple as finding and downloading the drivers to fix the problem. However, that is all moot with imaging, because if you are using a deployment image configured for your hardware you will never have an install problem ever. Period.
What makes sysprep powerful is, if you know how to configure it properly, you can build an image that is 100% complete (all software, custom security settings, networking options, etc.)- just gather all the drivers you need, and in about 20 minutes it is ready to deploy on virtually ANY computer (ignoring machine setup, that will take time no matter what OS you use, but it is only done once for thousands of machines). It takes about 10 minutes to deploy an image.
While I use Linux at home, I don't have experience making images for multiple machines for it like I do windows, so you may be right about the difference in the way Linux operates and the way Windows operates which could make my point moot, but I don't think so. Linux still uses different HALs, and while you can use an older HAL to get your image to run on almost anything, it sure as hell isn't going to run well on anything new. I also don't think the driver issue is as trivial as you make it out to be, they still need to be in the correct location and correctly configured, else why wouldn't the Ubuntu install be a simple format>copy operation?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I remember that my cousin used to say that linux was finicky when it came to hardware. The problem was that the hard drive had a bunch of bad sectors, which showed up on the console, and in syslog. Since Windows never reported any problems, the problem turned from a bad hard drive, to a "finicky OS" in my cousin's mind.
It wasn't until months later when random problems would keep appearing, even after
fresh reinstalls, that the hardware was suspected as being the problem.
Disk imaging probably is an option for Linux, however I don't think the tools are as developed as they are for Windows, so I imagine you would not be able to do many hardware configurations with a single image.
Uhh, you realize Linux distros just package their kernels with every single open source driver there is and that every single piece of hardware is detected fresh on each and every boot, right? Linux doesn't configure itself only for the particular hardware it sees at install time like Windows does.
Xorg was the last remaining component to do that, and that was fixed with Xorg 7.2 and released in Ubuntu 7.10 a year and a half and three releases ago.
...assuming the particular OS doesn't matter - it often doesn't between these two
Discarding the OS difference is quite an assumption and not easily done. As someone who had to maintain mixed Mac/PC/SGI/Linux environments, including every random thing clients walked in with, it's pretty clear which machines work and which don't. A Windows laptop walks in and you're standing there trying to get them connected to Wi-Fi, figure out why their email doesn't work, why they can't print etc. You never hear about a Mac laptop walking in because they just set up and start working. All of these people are essentially non-technical consumers.
The operating system makes all the difference, aside from the fact that most PC laptops I've encountered fell apart way sooner than the Macs.
Generally, the Windows machines are cranky, invasive, needy, rigid, arbitrary, vague and complex compared to OS X. That's why I have a Mac at home and why over 100 people who had their first exposure to Macs at my shop also have them at home now. Sure, some people work Windows machines better than others but it becomes a badge of pride and a platform to snipe at things that are different. "Pretty" might help get them in the door but working better and longer makes them more useful and practical.
The difference is real which is why Microsoft is so freaked out right now. The price difference isn't as real as many people try to maintain. RAM doesn't cost $500 a gig. Your $700 HP laptop has last year's processor, shared graphics, slow buss speed, poor battery performance and feels more like a scanner full of sand than a laptop. Apple doesn't sell into the junk computer market which is viewed as a major failing by people who would buy it. I wouldn't mind cheaper Macs but the price difference is well within the bounds of extra value.
Most of the stuff on