MS Trying To Spur Vista Sales With Discounts 329
Ang writes "Is Microsoft having worries about selling Vista already? Ars reports that Microsoft has announced yet another 'discount program' for Vista, but these new discounts work out to only about 10% off list price — not much when you notice that retailers already sell Vista below list. To make matters worse, the discount program would still end up costing you $100 more than the older 'family' discount built around Vista Ultimate in some situations. Ars spends seven paragraphs explaining this convoluted offer. Is all of this complexity supposed to help sell Vista?" If you must buy Vista, it might be advisable to sit on your wallet for a while. The discounts are bound to get sweeter.
Keep on waiting... (Score:4, Insightful)
Tom Peterson (Score:3, Insightful)
And I agree.
At this point, I have no interest in paying for Windows. I do, however, require at least one Windows box (currently XP64) for gaming and testing deployment of some of our enterprise applications at home. I also don't really care to go through the trouble of finding a viable crack on bit torrent or anything. I will probably buy it once there are games which I must have that demand DirectX10 for the coolest gaming experience -- and I will do so when I am in the process of building a new machine so that I can get the OEM version.
Even at that, I will not spend $200. I might spend $140. And that's for the full version (4gb+, multi-core, 64bit, etc). Otherwise they can just eat it. The only reason I ever need to jump off my solaris, debian or OSX boxes is to play games. Period.
Why ? (Score:5, Insightful)
All I know... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Keep on waiting... (Score:4, Insightful)
Between OEMs putting it on all new systems and people opting for it on their home-builds once games start making use of DirectX 10, Vista will rule the market just like XP, 2000, 98, 95, etc have.
It really sucks having to have a special OS just to play videogames.
Oh well.
Good deals for retailers (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from generating revenue, MS has to prove to share holders that the $5bn that was spent on Vista development was worth doing and they can only do that by showing an increase in sales vs XP. There must be a lot of shareholders wondering whether it would have been better to just put the money in the bank and ride XP for longer. After all, anyone not buying Vista would still buy XP, so what motivates spending $5bn?
Re:All I know... (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny.... not a single tech where I work thinks it's worth upgrading except to play with and learn to fulfill our job duties. We use it all the time. We field tons of questions that end up being answered with "Sorry you just bought a machine with Vista on it. Now you have to wait for the compatible ___________ (driver/app/game patch) to run that ___________ (piece of hardware/app/game)". We have a ton of HP laptops that dont even have proper webcam support in Vista - even though the webcam is built in to the machine. We have lots of multi-function "Vista Ready" printers that only print on Vista... no scan, no fax via computer, no reading from the card readers built into them. We have numerous machines with the most horrendous video support imaginable - right out of the box. The "lower end" systems running the Vista Demo video are getting 5-10 frames per second... and by lower end, I mean AMD 4000+ and similar speed Intels, with what otherwise would be at least mid-range or decent video chipsets. We have people coming in all the time asking why WoW (and dozens of other games) doesnt run properly, or does weird things. Or why Sleep/Suspend/Hibernate does weird things. Or why so many "Vista Capable"/"Vista Ready" pieces of hardware or software dont run or run poorly.
As for sales slumping... well, at the CompUSA we work at, we didnt start to move Vista until recently - and I think that was due to two factors (1) we sold out of XP finally and (2) since we are a closing store, we are discounting it by 15%. Yes, they are finally selling, but still at a snails pace... a handful before this change happened has become two handfuls now. Anyone wants to buy a copy or three, come on in, we have TONS still. And they are discounted 15% at my store at the least - if not in all the closing stores (some may even have higher discounts already). Our Mac sales, oddly, have tripled - we are near out of them (and they are more expensive and barely discounted at all), but have tons of Vista machines, and people coming in to buy every last XP machine we have (only thing left are some Systemax boxes that no one seems too keen on buying... anything else with XP RAN out the door rather quickly).
Robert
Re:Keep on waiting... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm evaluating Vista Business on my office desktop atm, its been installed for 2 weeks, aside from it feeling a little bloated its working fine so far. (A64-3500+, 1 GB Ram, nforce 4 mobo, nVidia 6800GS)
I was quite surprised actually when I installed it on a slightly older PC last week, I was having serious problems getting the onboard RAID on the MSI K8N SLI Platinum to work properly with an additional drive. More likely an MSI problem than an XP Problem.
(1GB DDR400, A64-3000+ CPU, nVidia 6800GS)
XP just wouldn't recognize the additional drive, or the onboard SATA controller for the drive. I figured since the install was pretty much shot I'd try installing a copy of Vista business upgrade and see how much worse it could get. I was actually shocked when everything was detected on install, and its running fine (if a little slowly) now.
So in a sense it actually reduced my aggravation, though mainly because I'm not the one who has to use that PC.
Riiiight (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeh, sure...Microsoft is crying all the way to the bank.
Is this that slow of a news day?
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
See my
IBM went through the kind of humbling process I am talking about. IBM is no longer the "environment" where computing is concerned, but it has been the source of funding for great pure research and incredible development efforts for decades. With a little "spanking" from the courts, I think M$ might become a good, yet still very profitable, corporate citizen.
having so many editions is part of the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
IMO, Vista Enterprise shouldn't exist with the bitlocker and other "enterprise" features being either made available in Vista Business or as some kind of add-on.
The "N" versions need to exist to comply with anti-trust rulings and really are just the normal versions with windows media player files removed from the CD/DVD
and the installer.
That would basically leave 4 editions of vista, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate
Re:Costco... (Score:3, Insightful)
But this isn't too much of a concern for Microsoft since they only accounted for 10% of XP's sales. However since Vista is not selling anywhere near as well as XP, I'm willing to bet they wish that they were selling well at this point and that they had put a little more focus into this segment of the market.
The vista refund that may get results (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Keep on waiting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Windows Vista is the New Coke of Operating Syst (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope at least in your own mind you were trying to be funny.
The Win9x code base with no security and roots to 3.1 and DOS is why developers have screwed up many applications still in use on XP.
Also consider XP runs well on 80MB and a 200mhz processor (faster than Win95 or Win98 did), it is time to let these computers die, as most Linux distributions won't even run on them.
Re:Costco... (Score:2, Insightful)
ME, on the other hand, which I was running before XP... well... There was definitely a sense of urgency in switching to XP.
Re:All I know... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here, I'll give you my opinion too:
I have installed it and I have used it, and I hated it.
Well, I guess you're going to have to toss a coin on who to believe...
Re:Costco... (Score:1, Insightful)
I was using 2000 (as in w2k), and I was highly reluctant in upgrading to XP.
I never did, on my own.
It was an invoulentary upgrade, it came with the boxes, basically.
Then there's the whole thing about it being stopped support-wise, by microsoft.
So... my 'incentive', for going 2k->XP, was force and fear. That's all it was.
Re:Keep on waiting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you ever game in DOS? In Windows 3.1? I guess you don't remember fiddling with your config.sys, messing around with the amounts and types of memory--EMS, XMS, conventional, etc? Do you not remember having to manually change screen resolution and color in windows 3.1 depending on the program? Fiddling with soundcard settings and environmental variables to get the IRQ/DMA/etc all nice and working with said game?
Not to mention, you had to install games for ANY of those operating systems--more so since DOS games usually were on floppies that had compressed files spread across multiple disks.
Geez, talk about rose tinted forgetting glasses!
Re:wtf kind of writeup is this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft seems confident that there are enough irrational people in the world to boost demand for an inferior, bloated product that lacks many promised features and requires 8 times more hardware to perform essentially the same functions.
Re:Keep on waiting... (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. When I play games, I mainly play RTS games and simulation games, and to my knowledge they all suck on a console. Consoles are good for some games, but not for everything.
Re:Good deals for retailers (Score:3, Insightful)
What I liked about Ubuntu was discovering them installed and working.
Ever hit a freeware site and try to figure out what is a demo, nagware, crippleware, etc. Having a configured machine ready to run is a nice break.
Re:Keep on waiting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good deals for retailers (Score:2, Insightful)