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Microsoft Discloses Windows 7 Pricing
It's the tripnaut! writes "Information Week has posted prices for Windows 7. From the article: 'The full version of Windows 7 Home Premium is priced at $199, with an upgrade from Vista or XP costing $119. The full version of Windows 7 Professional is $299, with upgrades going for $199. Windows 7 Ultimate is priced at $319, with the upgrade version at $219.' In a nod to the global economic downturn, it is interesting to note that prices are 10% lower than Vista."
I ended up getting Vista Ultimate.
Never saw ANY of the benefits/Ultimate Content that was promised.
The upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Win 7 Ultimate should be free.
That will teach me for buying a boxed, non-OEM version of Windows I guess.
Agreed.
MS should give the crippled version away free. The one that runs only 3 apps. Then there would be no getting your money back when you purchase a computer. It would also compete with the price of Linux and BSD. Then drop your tiered pricing by a lot. Home basic at $30, Home premium $50, Professional $150 and Ultimate at $175.
I bet a lot more people would "purchase" their OS if they structured it like that. I also think it would help in the level of illegal copies.
How did MS win in the web browser market? They made it free and included it in their OS.
Why not give away the lowest level of your OS for free to retain your market share?
That makes better sense to me at least.
Regards, Ben
I skipped Vista entirely. Tried it a few days and went back to XP until recently.
When Win 7RC came out I decided to give it a shot and quite frankly, I'm hooked.....
It's a damn fine OS for a average to power user. If you're still running XP this is a upgrade to consider. If you're running Vista.. hmm, might aswell wait until pricing dropped a bit.
But.. this is the first time I'm actually considering to buy Windows.
It runs smooth, behaves as one would expect from a OS.. In the end Win7 might end up as their best OS till now.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
At the very least it should be a $39 upgrade to Vista. If there's more in Windows 7 compared to Vista than there is in Snow Leopard compared to Leopard, I'll eat my shorts.
It seems to me that everyone I know has a pirated copy of windows: the few people people that have legal copies have them because they were bundled with the computer they bought. When was the last time someone actually went out specifically to bought a copy?
Your average "Joe Sixpack" home user will probably be running a pirated copy of Windows. Their computer may have come with a legal OEM license once upon a time... But they probably lost the discs somewhere along the way, and their OEM key probably didn't work with the discs their buddy found when they had to reload their computer to get rid of the viruses, so they wound up with a cracked copy of Windows. And then they heard about the shiny new Vista thing and their buddy hooked them up with a cracked copy of that, too.
Mot IT-ish folks I know have legal copies - frequently acquired using some kind of student discount or corporate volume licensing program. They aren't paying retail, but frequently don't trust the cracked copies available.
Most of the gamer folks I know have legal copies, but they're usually buying the OS with a pile of new hardware and get some kind of OEM version, so they aren't paying retail.
The big businesses will be on some kind of software maintenance plan with Microsoft. They'll be able to download and install whatever flavor of Windows they feel like. So they won't be paying retail.
The folks who typically wind up paying retail prices, from what I've seen, are the small/medium sized businesses. They don't want to run a cracked copy of Windows for fear of being audited... But they don't need enough licenses to make volume licensing or maintenance plans affordable... So they wind up buying a pile of retail boxes. And it can be expensive. Sometimes it is actually cheaper just to replace their computers entirely, and get the new version of Windows pre-installed on the machine.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I have been using Windows 7 for the last month or so (since it went from beta to RC) and, I have to say that I have liked MOST of the experience so far.
Stability is at least on par with XP (have not had to restart since I finished driver installs). Annoying messages have been minimal - they only appear when I am doing something that should require administrator credentials, such as installing a new application or driver.
Performance... I have no concrete figures but this also seems on par with XP.
The only down-side has been the installation time (hours, even on my beast) and the size of the OS(how DO you fit 20GB of data on a 3GB DVD anyways????).
So, the reason I want Windows 7 is so I can use all of my system's memory without a ramdisk/virtual memory hack and 64-bit support. There is really no other reason to upgrade because everything else seems on par with XP.
perhaps I could direct your attention to a fine catalog of vendors prepared to sell a PC in the natural state - start naked and free from all operating systems. For those who prefer not to pay for an unwanted proprietary operating system there are Naked Computers. If anyone sees a vendor out there with a naked system for sale please let me know. It has to be an up front option (full frontal if you prefer) not an under the counter, if you ask specially kind of deal. We are also mostly interested in complete computers, not a pile of bits, and we want a minimum order quantity of a single unit.
I have purchased only one copy of Windows(tm) in the last years; XP Professional(tm), and I paid almost $300 for it (all in, after taxes). Yes, I know I was taken for a fool, more on this later.
Now, I know that OEMs can't possibly be paying anything CLOSE to that, because I can buy a computer now WITH Windows and pay just a bit more than that.
So, I was led to believe that as a single consumer, I was being ripped off, and the only way to get a reasonable price for Windows was with a new computer. Simple, right?
Wrong. My wife works as a middle-school teach in the TDSB (Toronto District School Board). They have, what, 40,000 (more?) employees. My wife just got an offer - buy Windows Vista(tm) (Business?) for $21, and Office(tm) for $21. As far as I can tell (from the literature), there don't seem to any resale restrictions. And no "OEM" restrictions. The literature also mentions that the retail price for Office is north of $600.
How much DO Windows and Office cost? Since only idiots would buy retail Windows or Office (yes, I used to be in that category), the only reason to have ANY "suggested retail price" is to attempt to establish some sort of valuation.
"It's expensive, it MUST be good",
but no-one actually pays that price
"but I got a GREAT deal on the software!".
And now the suggested retail pricing pops up here, just to help spread the meme.
Of course, it is possible that the purchase was subsidized by the TDSB, in which case I will be very upset. The TDSB just ok'd the use of OpenOffice, and thus should have no need to spend the money.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I wouldn't trust an OS from a torrent aggregator unless I have some way to check its veracity (i.e.: Ubuntu posts md5's of its ISOs, but you won't find one for an iffy torrent.
This doesn't matter much anyways, since most corporate environments are on a volume license, and most home users will get Win7 preinstalled. It really only matters to geeks like us.
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine."
64-bit execution that works. XP-x64 has poor application compatibility compared with Vista-x64 and Win7-x64.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
But in reality, I buy an OEM copy of Windows Ultimate Whatever from Newegg for $129. I don't have to deal with the utterly retarded upgrade process every time I have to nuke & pave, and I've got an ugly little sticker to refer to when nuke & pave time rolls around.
You're assuming I give two shits about honoring the finer points of Microsoft's licensing, which I don't. Is MS going to come after me? Are they going to deactivate my Windows randomly? They deactivate retail copies randomly.
To be honest, It's more convenient for me to get a legit serial number that doesn't self-destruct than to deal with suspect WGA patches & cracks that work like an arms race and require constant vigilance.
As long as you don't reinstall more often than quarterly, activation goes through without the need for a dreaded phone call. In the case that it fails, I make the phone call and say (and I quote): "I had to replace the motherboard" and get an activation key in about five minutes. If you do this once a week, the phone drones sound vaguely annoyed with you, but you still end up with the number.
So, really, what's the downside here (apart from paying for it at all)? I'm curious.
That's because they haven't recovered the development costs for Vista, so you also have to pay for that if you purchase of Windows 7.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
Dropping the price may well increase the number of copies sold, but Microsoft doesn't directly care about that metric. It's all about the bottom line.
If you sell 100 copies at $300, you have $30,000 total, and 100 users to support.
If you sell 1000 copies at $30, you still have $30,000, but now you must support 1000 users.
The lower volume at a higher price is thus more profitable due to reduced support/maintenance costs. There is also the argument to be said that people who pirate Windows are likely to pirate it regardless of price, because there is little if any incentive to go legit.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I don't think Snow Leopard really has all that much over Leopard either. I think 2009 will be the year of almost meaningless OS updates.
(I boggle why I was marked as troll. I'm serious, people were pretty dissatisfied with Vista)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I had hoped that they would do like Apple this time and offer a family pack license. I can get Leopard with five licenses for a little over $130, less than half the cost of a second standalone copy. With four PCs in my household (my game PC, wife's, and two the kids use), even the cheapest upgrade option is nearly $500 if I upgraded all of them.
Which is why someone needs to start one of those anti-trust lawsuits Microsoft loves so much. How can any marketplace be competitive when an expensive product is sold cheaper than a free product. Really, the only way to stop Windows marketshare is to ensure that when you buy a Dell, you have to pay the retail price (ok, or a discounted price - but you have to pay extra) for the OS too.
If Dell had to be more transparent in its pricing, you might have the situation where you bought the hardware for X, the software for Y and a Dell-engineer installation (ie the disk duplication step) fee of Z. For Windows Y might be $100 and the installation $10, and Linux Y might be $0 but Z $200, but you'd see those prices and could decide to buy just the hardware and install your own OS. With the current situation, you just see that Windows is the cheapest option, which would be impossible in any other non-monopoly-based industry.
Yea. Microsoft doesn't sell pricey computers, so they have to find other ways to gouge us.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire