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.'"

Comments

Now If We Could Just Get ...

[eldavojohn]

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."

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[frecky]

You will never get the full Windows price back if you want Linux because Windows cost less with all the adware, spyware, trial that comes pre-installed with the computer.

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[NineNine]

Then we might be talking about "2009: The Year of the Recession and Linux on the Desktop."

Based on the last decade of Linux adoption, I think it's pretty clear that most desktop users are willing to pay a hundred bucks or two for Windows. I know that certainly am.

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the last decade of Linux adoption, I think it's pretty clear that most desktop users are willing to run a search on The Pirate Bay for Windows.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[davester666]

Really? Most desktop users?

I would guess that MOST desktop users haven't knowingly made the choice or are even aware that there is choice other than Windows. Some portion of computer buyers are aware of Apple computers and that they come with a different operating system.

Sure, some of the major manufacturers have occasionally offered a couple of models of computers with some variant of Linux available pre-installed, some even targeted for home and/or business end-users. But nobody (even today) has targeted a widespread ad compaign to even make people aware that there is such a thing as a 'Linux' choice (or Ubuntu or whatever).

Of all the computers destined for end-user use (either for business or home use), for non-techies (as in, the vast majority of people who use computers to do things, not do things to use computers), how many do you think can a) name an operating system at all (ie, Windows or MacOS), or b) name an OS other those two.

Simply put, I don't think you can say people have 'chosen' Windows over Linux, simply because they don't even know Linux exists.

And this is largely because of (IMHO) Microsoft's tactics in the 80's and 90's, that required computer manufacturers to either sell only computers with Microsoft operating systems or computers with non-Microsoft operating systems [or that you sell other operating systems, but the computer the customer got could only have the MS-operating system loaded (and paid for) and the customer had to erase it and install the other OS, etc].

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[techno-vampire]

Nonsense! All they have to do is set up one standard Ubuntu install and clone it, just like they do for Windows.

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[hairyfeet]

Oh PLEASE! You want to know why the OEMs ain't selling Linux boxes now? It is because the hardware you pick up to go with your new PC at Walmart, or Best Buy, or Staples don't work in Linux, that's why. Linux is a fricking support nightmare when it comes to home users!

I'd love to see YOU have to work support desk when someone like Dell rolled out a "home Linux" and had to deal with all the pissed off customers because they can't print with the brand new printer they just got at Walmart. I can just imagine your answer would probably "LOL Luser! LOL Winprinterz!" which is why for the foreseeable future Linux will be staying at 1% or less for home users. For servers Linux rocks. That is because it has serious money being spent by Red Hat and Novell to make sure that hardware works. Home users? It's a total crapshoot whether it will work or not.

All those that want Linux to succeed needs to face some facts-1.-You ain't NEVER gonna get home users to do 'research" before they go shopping. It ain't gonna hapn, capn. -2.- If it don't work it is YOUR FAULT. Don't blame the manufacturer, or the M$FT monopoly, or lack of open specs. Excuses are worthless. If it doesn't work your "free as in beer and freedom" is "free as in worthless" to the customer.

If you want the Dells and Acers and the mom & pop shops all pushing Linux and supporting it, then you have got to step up to the plate. Make DAMNED SURE that everything in Walmart, Staples, Office Depo, and Best Buy "just works" PERIOD. Because the customers don't care about "free as in beer or freedom" they just want that new all in one they picked up at Walmart to work. In Windows they get a shiny disc with a pretty animation of a friendly helper who hold their hand and walks them through everything. In Linux if you are LUCKY you get told "open up bash and type" some big ass line of arcane commands. That is if you are lucky, which is frankly unacceptable in and of itself. But more likely with consumer gear they are gonna get told "Sorry but that ain't NEVER gonna work" or worse some asshat going "LOL Winprinters!". Which translates to "Please take this machine back where you got it and demand Windows, where it will work.".

Of this I know, because I have tried 4 times in the last 4 years to sell Linux boxes. Frankly it is 1000 times cheaper to buy a copy of XP Home and figure it into the sale price than it was to deal with the support nightmare that is consumer gear under Linux. Hell it was easier to slap Win98 and sell them than it was to deal with a brand new Ubuntu. At least Win98 supports the damned printers at Walmart.

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[ewanm89]

Same with windows with all the drivers. It's no different.

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Canada it's a purse, eh?

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[jedidiah]

> Oh PLEASE! You want to know why the OEMs ain't selling Linux boxes now? It is because the
> hardware you pick up to go with your new PC at Walmart, or Best Buy, or Staples don't work in
> Linux, that's why. Linux is a fricking support nightmare when it comes to home users!

1998 Called. It want's it's FUD back.

I've bought hardware for Linux at all of those places without being terribly
concerned about Linux compatability. Occassionally I wil forget to consider
it entirely and still come out of it unscathed.

Normal consumers have very meagre demands all around and device support
on Linux is hardly the nightmare you make it out to be.

There's certainly a lot of fear mongering that goes on about it.

Thanks for participating.

I always get a chuckle out of rants like yours whenever I see one of
those warnings on a USB device warning you to not plug it in until
you've installed the drivers first...

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[Bigjeff5]

Actually, as far as imaging goes, it's very different. Linux is notoriously finicky when it comes to hardware, windows has always been more forgiving, and even Vista at release had fewer hardware issues than Linux has always been stuck with.

MS also has a number of free tools - the most basic and essential being sysprep which finds and installs all drivers on boot and resets SIDs among other things - to make mass imaging deployments really worthwhile starting around windows 2000, and starting with Vista it is so easy to create images that work on a huge variety of hardware it's almost rediculous. I know of no Linux equivalent, and that's a bigger issue than you may realize.

MS even got rid of the standard windows setup procedure in Vista and moved even non-oem OS installs (i.e. from disc) to the imaging model. If you look on a Vista install DVD you'll see a number of .wim files and a .iso or two. Properly configured, WinPE (comes with Vista) + ImageX (free download, comes with Vista) + Sysprep (not sure if it actually comes with Vista officially, but with ImageX you can dig around in the Vista wim file and copy it out of there, or you can download it from MS for free) all add up to an image that works on virtually any hardware.

My company uses just one image for at least 50,000 pc's, maybe more, about 10 different manufacturers and about 20 models apiece. So, yeah. It's harder to set up in Vista, but it is doable. I can't wait till Windows7 gets cleared for my environment so I can start playing with the server side tools, since Vista will never be approved and the server tools don't work for making XP images (they work for deployment though).

This also may be a reason for the reluctance to push Linux. If there aren't effective tools for mass-imaging both OEM and enterprise level deployments for Linux it could easilly add significant costs to the sale of Linux PCs. Theoretically you could use MS imaging tools (which, gotta say again, are awesome, Ghost aint shit no more), but you can't use sysprep, which is the bread and butter of OEM windows installs. I don't know what a linux equivalent would be, and without it you are limited to one image per each individual hardware configuration. You may be able to script some of it, but eventually you are just installing a straight up Linux install. The cost savings in time and manpower of the image deployment model vs the scripted install model is really, very significant. We are talking a machine is ready to package and ship in 5-10 minutes verses 30 minutes or an hour or even more depending on what had to be done to the install. That's huge.

If you try to go with imagine for Linux without a mass deployment tool to save time (and therefore money), you are talking hundreds of images to deploy Linux vs just one for Windows. I guess you'd have to be rolling your own mass produced images (like I do, heh) to understand how much manpower that is going to add to the sale of a Linux PC. Just trust me that it is significant. That $200 gap really starts to dwindle if you have image deployment inefficiencies. Coupled with crapware savings, and it could easilly be a wash or worse for Linux.

This is actually the first time I've thought about the whole problem like that, and I think I finally get why you don't see massive savings for linux PCs except in situations where the hardware pool is small and constant (i.e. OLPC, initial EEEPC, etc).

Re:Now If We Could Just Get ...

[totally bogus dude]

The whole premise of your post seems off to me. Linux loads just about everything at runtime. You don't need a sysprep equivalent because it doesn't store the driver it's going to use. For example consider Window's weird USB support; I think this might be fixed in Vista, but I'm not 100% sure. Certainly with XP if you plug a USB storage device into a USB port, it'll load drivers and then present it to you. Remove it and plug the exact same thing into a different USB port... it'll load drivers and then present it to you. Plug it in to the same port and it's instantly available.

This goes to the core of driver support, even well into the "Plug and Play" era: Windows always associates drivers with particular hardware device addresses and has to store configuration information whenever that changes. No such issues on Linux. The closest you'd get is having to clean up the udev files which ensure particularly hardware gets assigned the same device name each boot (i.e. the various _persistent_ rulefiles).

The only other issue you might have is if the kernel is unable to boot on the hardware, though pretty much all distributions use large initrds which include drivers for virtually everything.

Once upon a time I rebuilt my PC, and decided to see if I could get away with not having to re-install Windows as the build was very similar. It did in fact work quite well. I had a dual boot system. Linux booted up as normal, just a bit faster because of the faster processor etc. Windows booted up okay, then futzed around saying it was installing drivers for my new hardware and needed a reboot or two before it was happy. It wasn't quite right though, as from thereafter it never shut down properly. It would shut down Windows, but wouldn't turn the power off or reboot. I guess the power management was slightly different with the new motherboard, and Windows had at some point installed something specific for the previous chipset. The Linux kernel just works out what needs to be done each time it's booted, and so it all worked perfectly fine.

At work I've upgraded a Linux server installed on an HP DL360 to a DL380 just by moving the drives to the new system. The only complication I would ever imagine facing is if the hardware RAID controller doesn't recognise the drives, but I didn't have that issue as they were similar-generation. I wouldn't even try that with a Windows install, because even if the hardware seems to be 100% identical Windows will still notice different device IDs and have a hissy fit. The only problem I encountered with the Linux install was that the network interfaces were assigned silly names because it was reserving eth0 and eth1 for the previous IDs; again, just nuking those persistent config files and rebooted sorted it out.

You do make a good point about kickbacks from pre-installing all the garbage you get with a big manufacturer PC. While they could do the same thing with Linux, I'd imagine most people opting for Linux at this stage would find that to be a complete deal-breaker. In addition, the fact that Windows and Linux are in many ways very different platforms does add complications -- they've had many many years to organise their deployment strategies and toolchains around Windows' peculiarities, and adapting to the peculiarities of any other system will obviously involve some cost.

I would also imagine that they make some amount of profit by including commercial software, in the same way a retail shop selling boxes of software makes a bit of profit. If everything you're including is free software, then it's harder to profit off of that -- the natural end-game would seem to be vendors competing purely on the basis of hardware costs, which I don't think any of them particularly want to do.

It is called signaling

[davebarnes]

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.

Re:Microsoft decides to price-gouge

[eldavojohn]

News at 11.

Tom Tucker: We now go live to Asian correspondent Tricia Takanawa.
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: ... and that concludes our newscast, from Quahog 5 goodnight everyone.

something doesn't add up here...

[ecalkin]

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

No, probably not

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:No, probably not

[Anachragnome]

There is one VERY important factor you are not taking into consideration--the fact that Ubuntu(Canonical Ltd.) makes THEIR money from service, not sales.

If you think about it, this could be a home-run for both Dell and Ubuntu, not to mention the rest of the open-source realm.

Dell and Canonical Ltd. could come to some sort of agreement where the customer service is done by Canonical Ltd. and is pre-paid with the purchase of the of the computer(the service fees charged by Canonical). If Canonical Ltd. determines that the problem is hardware related, the customer is referred to Dell for further service.

Dell could even reimburse Canonical a small sum to offset the inevitable calls that are hardware based, but solved in a few moments without further need of Dell being involved.

Canonical Ltd. comes out smelling like roses, probably with a huge increase in market-share, and Dell washes their hands of most of the CS headaches that they deal with, ones that are mostly the result of problems associated with WINDOWS.

Windows 7 price higher than Vista's

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

it's not cash they need

[joeflies]

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.

I don't know that they are really raising prices

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Perceived Value

[Phroggy]

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.

Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2

[Ant P.]

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.

Solution: Pre-install linux and windows?

[atmurray]

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.

Small business

[Groggnrath]

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.

Re:Win7 = OS costs more than reasonable hardware

[icannotthinkofaname]

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?

Re:Microsoft charges more and more, yet...

[icannotthinkofaname]

*sees (Score:3, Informative)*

Equally informative: sky remains blue, water remains wet, Pope remains Catholic.

*expects a +5 with some adjective*

Yeah, right

[davmoo]

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".

Enjoy the software?

[NemoinSpace]

may not be able to enjoy the software as soon as they'd like,

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!!!

Re:Win7 = OS costs more than reasonable hardware

[value_added]

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.