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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.'"
Now if we could just get Dell to put a little drop down option in its OS & Productivity Suite selection to have an option for "Ubuntu & Open Office (subtract $200)" on all of their computers. And then to have it actually be $200 cheaper with the exact hardware.
Then we might be talking about "2009: The Year of the Recession and Linux on the Desktop."
My work here is dung.
Dell is obviously unhappy with the price and they are signalling (Cards. a play that reveals to one's partner a wish that he or she continue or discontinue the suit led.) to Microsoft their discontent.
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News at 11.
Tom Tucker: We now go live to Asian correspondent Tricia Takanawa. ... and that concludes our newscast, from Quahog 5 goodnight everyone.
Tricia Takanawa: *nasally* Tom, I'm standing here in a hotel room with Steve Ballmer and I'm about to purchase Windows 7.
*Steve grunts and starts to rip off her pants*
Tricia Takanawa: Tom, you'll notice that Steve is not even bothering to kiss me first or even lube up. He is going straight for my black cherry. Back to you, Tom & Diane.
Diane Simmons: Gripping story, Tricia. We now go live to Ollie Williams with a fiscal forecast about Windows 7. Ollie?
Ollie Williams: SHITS EXPENSIVE!
Tom Tucker: Thank you Ollie.
Diane Simmons:
My work here is dung.
microsoft is a company sitting on 25 billion dollars. they apparently sold $3-4 billion in bonds? they are *raising* prices during some of the worst economic times that a lot of people of have seen.
it's like they have a pressing need for more than $30 billion?
for a company that needs to sell operating systems to maintain their future, it doesn't make sense.
e
Squeeze it too hard, and what you have is not so much a cow as a pile of hamburger...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
See that won't happen for two reasons. One is that MS gives you better licensing when you bundle Windows with all systems from a line. However the major reason is that Dell doesn't want to put up with the shit it would generate. It would be a tech support nightmare if they did that on main stream, consumer systems. You'd get a great many people doing it because it saves money. However they'd give no thought to if their apps would work or if they were willing to spend the time learning a new OS and so on. They'd get flooded with calls about it and have all sorts of angry people.
That's why when companies do offer things like Linux or no OS options, they do so on business type machines. When they are selling to an organization with their own support, they hope you can figure out what will and will not work for you. For home users? Ya not so much. They'd buy it, try to install a game, then complain because it didn't work.
Also, based on the prices Dell pays, it'd be $100 or less per computer.
Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't hold a true monopoly. You see, Microsoft competes with itself.
Windows 7 has to compete with Vista and XP and even 2000. That's tough competition. When I need to run PC apps, XP does everything I need with the least overhead.
Windows 7 pricing will be higher than Vista's
Oh I'm so glad I bought Vista and qualify for a free Windows 7 upgrade.
Right?
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.
Note that Dell doesn't actually come out and say that. They aren't saying "MS is charging us $20 more per copy." They are hinting at it, but hedging their terms. What it smells like to me is Dell wants a better rate than they've been getting in the past, and this is one of the tactics they are using to get it.
Companies posture over pricing all the time, and sometimes publicly. If Dell can get people mad at MS for their high prices, even if the prices are no higher than they normally are, then maybe they get more leverage.
So while I have no inside knowledge of the situation, that's my bet. MS is keeping 7 prices the same, and Dell thinks they should be cut.
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
Sometimes if you make it more expensive, people will buy it for that reason alone. They see the higher price, and think that there must be a good reason for it to be a little bit more expensive than the alternatives.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I already pay a higher price for XP compared to Vista. Now I'm gonna have to pay a higher price for 7 compared to Vista?
I don't get it. My theory of Vista as an expectation lowering decoy gets more and more plausible.
Damn that's some mighty smelly bait. I hope no one is foolish enough to actually take it and respond seriously to it... it will just make the entire thread sick.
Probably the value/price ratio will be better for Windows 7 than for Vista (or at least, the perception of it). Of course, if you take that into account Mac OS X could have a better ratio, and Linux, well, give math headaches.
Error: Floating point division by zero
Being forced to run 10.2 is much like being stuck with any machine old enough to have come with 10.2 pre-installed.
You got it free because it is OLD, not because it's inherently bad.
This guy probably has a current Mac these days.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
If you don't like what you hear, discredit the author's opinion by using the words "bait" or "troll". Don't even consider the fact that the author might ACTUALLY hate the Macintosh he's typing upon. No that couldn't possibly be.
Anyway I stand by what I said about OS 10.2 refusing to display youtube.com, or install Flash Player, or run Firefox 3. That's pathetic. Even my ancient Windows 98 laptop will let me watch youtube or other website videos. Why can't OS 10.2? Makes no sense.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
When I need to run PC apps, XP does everything I need with the least overhead.
As long as you don't need more than 4GB of addressing space...
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
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!
But, as you said, we don't have the information. We do know that the cost of shipping Linux is $0 and the cost of shipping Windows is $X. For some value of X > 0. We also suspect that shipping a version of Linux costs them Y for Y > 0 because they have to pay protection to Microsoft. We don't know how much the crapware people are paying Dell (et al) for their junk to be included.
But for an OS - without crapware, without coerced payments to microsoft for protection money, without advertising and junk - we know that linux is cheaper and (for the most part) better. We know that Dell (et al) are doing what Microsoft wants because Microsoft is the big bully on the playground. And we know that everyone goes along with it because at some point some Microsoft peon (perhaps the public schools, perhaps a cheezy university), perhaps their boss, said "Microsoft is the Beez Kneez" and they (sadly) bought the party line. Very little different than the peasants in Stalin-land.
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.
Some of the smaller businesses may not be able to enjoy the software as soon as they'd like
Translation: They'll buy it anyway, because MS could shit in a box and small Businesses with little to no technical support or knowledge would still feel forced to buy it because they don't know they don't have to.
When I need to run PC apps, XP does everything I need with the least overhead.
As long as you don't need more than 4GB of addressing space...
XP : now in 64-bit flavor (Newegg link as they appear to be willing to still sell it, unlike Microsoft).
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
Fsck that. Seriously. Fsck. That.
Why this mad obsession with checking a filesystem? What is so exciting about sitting there and having your computer make sure that you disks are consistent and not broken and stuff?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
*sees (Score:3, Informative)*
Equally informative: sky remains blue, water remains wet, Pope remains Catholic.
*expects a +5 with some adjective*
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Linux remains free of value to noob consumers that are already confused when the colors of their Word icons change.
There, fixed that for you.
It's only tough competition because Microsoft hasn't brought anything new to the table with their OSs in the past decade.
The trap Microsoft got themselves into was behaving if they were approaching the classic monopoly endgame. Capitalism requires constant improvement, otherwise customers will buy competitors' products, but once you own the market, there's no point continuing to improve your product. For software, improving your product is almost the ONLY significant cost, so when you want to maximise profit, you stop development.
Microsoft did that. They took their foot off the pedal and relaxed. Now that freeze on innovation is coming back to bite them.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Commodore, There are just too many variables to consider. That Mac OS dates back from 2002. Its hardware specs could even be older than 2002. Your friend (or his family) could have accidentally damaged it, poured coffee into it, or whatever...
Personally, I still have a Windows laptop that runs Windows Me. It can play youtube videos, yes (sort of), but it can't update itself -- it can't update its Internet Explorer (It hasn't been able to for a couple of years). And it can't do a number of things that most computer users would now take for granted. It's basically just a piece of crap that I reserve for family members when they come and visit.
And while I agree that your parent post should have never been modded down into -1 flamebait status, I think you're expecting too much from a machine that was just given to you for free after it stopped working properly in the first place.
640k should be enough for any...oh,never mind.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
The spent millions just on a four-note "startup sound" that apparently most of us will never hear. Seven years in development down the tubes.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
-
Why don't you drop the $60 bucks on 10.3 disks? You can generally skip a few versions of Mac OS X, but you have gone over board. The Mac OS market isn't big enough for most companies to support that antiqued OS regardless. Bitch if you want, but that is how it is. A lot of core APIs were still forming then which exasperate things.
When open source projects start only supporting back to Mac OS 10.4, you know you have a problem. It means there aren't enough people out there. If you're brave, you can try porting FF3 to Mac OS 10.2. That is what people did with Mozilla on Mac OS 9 for a while. But it's much more fun to bitch, isn't it?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
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.
No one has to get the latest Windows7? Oh, yes, because we hate Vista we need to buy Windows7. Nonsense. Hardware prices are going down, and so will software. And here also Linux comes into play. Desktop Linux does not need to become a reality it is just necessary to strategically invest in alternatives. Asus is a perfect example.
...though in just about every other aspect the operating system is beating Vista...
Definitely the marketing slogan they should come out with "Better than Vista, almost better than the Swine Flu!"
Enjoy the software? Enjoy the Software! I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL BALMER, as soon as i finish toking on this EULA
#turns back to keyboard. types r-u-n-o-n-c-e in breathless anticipation.
#fade to next scene, a forlorn penguin wandering aimlessly somewhere in antarctica, mutters under his breath... What do I have to do? Give this shit away? I'm never gonna get off this island. Looks towards the heavens... STEEEEEEEEEEEEVE!!!
So? You make one image for each motherboard/chipset. I thought that was implicit in what I wrote.
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The biggest effect will be on Netbooks. Windows did not start making up a large portion of netbook os sales until the price for xp was lowered. With this sudden rise in prices you will see a move back to Dell's Ubuntu.
Squeeze it too hard, and what you have is not so much a cow as a pile of hamburger...
That's OK, I'd trade my piece of shit Vista install for a good hamburger. In-N-Out would be great, or maybe Five Guys.
Maybe this is the "Mac tax" everyone talks about? I never understood what that meant, but if Mac users have to keep spending ~$150 every other year to upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 (plus the necessary RAM upgrades), then that could get damn expensive.
Except that... you didn't spend ANY of that money upgrading THAT machine. Not even your friend spent the money.
So now you can spend ~$150 for the first time ever in that machine's life and get 10.4 on it. That should be enough for the life of that old Mac. Or maybe it can handle 10.5, that's even better.
I've had the same XP installation since 2002. I've never had to spend a dime to upgrade from XP to SP1 to SP2 to SP3.
That's because MS delayed the release of Longhorn (Vista) for so many years: there was no new OS to upgrade XP to. (Originally Longhorn was expected to ship in late 2003, and yes, you would have had to pay for it.) And when they finally released Vista... it turned out to be so bloated that pretty much no PC from 2002 would is able to handle it anyway!
On the Mac side the best approach would have been to skip 10.3 and buy 10.4 in 2005. There you have it. $150 in total and you would have had a kick-ass machine with an OS that many consider better than XP or Vista for four years now.
But no. Your friend had to be cheap.
You could have adware, spyware and trialware for Linux distros... if there were a market for them.
Maybe the Linux community doesn't really want the hoi polloi using Linux.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
In most cases, you don't even need to do that with Ubuntu.
Aside from having separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions, the one Ubuntu OS image should boot on all supported hardware. It does not store hardware state, ships with a full set of drivers and auto-detects everything at startup.
Quite possibly a Windows PowerUser(TM) who discovered that Linux file systems don't require the daily defragmentation that Windows' NFTS does, and is now having trouble finding something to do.
Way to think like a Windows user...
Many Linux distros have generic kernels available. It's the kernel's job to detect the motherboard/chipset and utilize the proper modules or wired-in definitions (if necessary)
And tools like Kudzu autodetection are useful also.
Think "plug and play", and not like Windows' "plug and pray".
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
This is just Dells message to Microsoft telling them they will not eat a higher wholesale cost. They are swinging the bat they have to make MS lower the licensing costs.
Good for them.
Chuck
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
Yes, it's FAR better leaving the machine switched on for 9 months, then on reboot, having to wait 7 hours for the filesystem to repair itself.
Go fsck yourself