Microsoft Cuts Vista Price In 70 Countries

dforristall alerts us to an odd move by Microsoft: cutting the price of retail boxes of Vista in many markets. Analysts didn't see this one coming, and they are scratching their heads a bit over it; one called it "very unheard of." The price cuts vary by country — they're largest in the developing world where piracy levels are high — and they don't apply to OEM copies of Vista, which account for 90% of sales. "Gartner analyst Michael Silver said the move... is puzzling... [He] noted that the market for such upgrades is fairly limited. Those who bought XP in the fourth quarter of 2006 got a coupon for a free Vista upgrade, while most of those who have bought systems since then have gotten Vista. Machines purchased prior to 2006 probably aren't all that attractive as candidates for a Vista upgrade... 'The whole notion of upgrading PCs has sort of fallen by the wayside.'"

This is aimed at power users...

[tjstork]

I have a dual Opteron with a fairly decent graphics controller that would be an ideal candidate for Vista x64 Ultimate. But, for about $400 cheaper, (or $200 if you get the system builder edition), I downloaded Ubuntu and it works great.

Taken together, Microsoft's actions of the last few weeks : decreasing the price of Vista, giving away Visual Studio to Students, publishing specifications, all point towards an effort to attract developers to their platform. Even the channel partnerships that I railed about earlier are structured to attract developers. Clearly, Microsoft knows something that we don't know, and, I think it is that Linux development is starting to reach a critical mass for them to be really concerned about it. I wonder how much trouble Microsoft realizes it is in.

There is a demographic factor going on as well. A lot of we formerly reliable Windows zealots are now in our 30s and 40s, and suddenly money that would be spent on graphics cards and Windows upgrades is now getting plowed into our over-priced houses and our children. It's like, I would have stayed up in line to get Vista Ultimate the day it came out, but instead, I bought diapers, soy milk and a thomas the tank engine train set for my son. Having jonesed for some sort of an upgrade to my PC, I went with Ubuntu instead, and its pretty satisfying.

Linux has hit that point where, it may not be the best in terms of a consumer operating system, but its often good enough, and installing it just works.

Why on earth were they surprised?

[sheldon]

In an interview, newly minted Windows consumer marketing vice president Brad Brooks said that Microsoft had been testing lower prices over the past few months and was surprised to find that the amount of revenue lost was more than made up for by an increase in the number of PC buyers willing to shell out for an upgrade.

Didn't they learn this lesson with the Student/Teacher version of Office?

Duh

hardware upgrades

[esocid]

Machines purchased prior to 2006 probably aren't all that attractive as candidates for a Vista upgrade. "I guess at the end of the day anything that makes Vista a little bit more accessible is probably a good thing," he said, but added that a cut in the price computer makers pay would have a far bigger impact, given new PC licenses account for 80 percent of Vista sales. "The whole notion of upgrading PCs has sort of fallen by the wayside."

While that may apply to Joe Blows who aren't tech savvy, I wouldn't say that it applies to all customers. Those who actually build (assemble) their own computers know the importance of hardware upgrades. I recently acquired my brother's old setup (AMD X2 4200+) with a 7900GTOC, which is a pretty good upgrade from my old CPU/mobo/GPU as well as 3 more gigs of memory, but rather than try out the 64 bit version of Vista (which I was tempted to do) it just didn't seem worth it to me with all the lack of hardware drivers, and software compatibility issues so I just did a fresh install of XP Pro (with fedora 8 on the 1st partition) rather than deal with the headache of trying to fix any issues that would arise.
What I think makes the brunt of those new sales is that people who have the money to shell out for what the salesman at best buy tells them to get, will also shell out for the newest thing, which in this case is vista in terms of OSs. I will personally feel fine using XP until Vista's issues are either resolved or it's put in the ground.

Re:They need to drop the price of XP

[TripMaster Monkey]

Actually, there's no need to purchase a copy of XP to replace your Vista...you can usually talk the OEM into a free downgrade to XP...that's what my company does, as we're completely uninterested in inflicting this wretched excuse for an OS on our systems, users, and network.

The price only matters...

[symbolset]

if the product works.

Did they fix that? I thought not. Nothing to see here.

Re:still waiting

[duncan3dc]

I see you've done sound research on Vista before making your "Funny" comment.

I would actually expect more than half the resources to be used up, if SuperFetch was doing it's job. Which it does do, and very well I might add.

Don't like it? Turn it off.

Don't know anything about a subject? STFU

Office for Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

"While much of the sales were for the new Office 2007, Swenson said just over 20 percent of all boxed copies of Office were Office for Mac. Swenson credited the large number of people switching to Macs as part of the reason for the spike in Mac Office sales."

This tidbit about Office sales is also interesting. I guess a significant fraction of people who abandon Windows for Mac systems still pay Microsoft for Office, so it isn't all bad for Microsoft even if people switch.

Wireless Ubuntu Works

[tjstork]

So you didn't save as much, and good luck if you ever want to use wireless with that Ubuntu computer.

I am wireless with the Ubuntu computer. I didn't have to do anything. When I installed Ubuntu, I got the little wireless icon on my upper right hand corner, hit connect... to my wireless network, and it completely worked, just like the little wireless icon on my Windows XP does.

Re:The whole idea of upgrading PCs???

[Lumpy]

From what I remember they did the same thing with windows Me. nobody was buying it and they were desperate to sell it so they lowered the price drastically.

People still Ignored it with the low prices. I have a real retail copy matted and framed in my office as incredibly few people have ever seen one.

Re:Why on earth were they surprised?

[Detritus]

If you take Economics 101, you might find out that it isn't always true. Sometimes sales drop when prices are reduced. The Wikipedia article on supply and demand has references to cases where the normal rules don't work.

Re:still waiting

[pherthyl]

That's different. The used memory in Linux is used by disk caches. If you type free you get a more accurate number in the second row where the caches are subtracted.

Vista actually uses lots of memory that does not get reclaimed when apps need it. When I log in to a clean desktop, memory use is around 500-600mb, and that is real memory use, not caches. When I start using apps that require a lot of memory, data starts to be written to swap. As soon as you hit swap, you've already lost the performance game. In linux, when I start using lots of memory in my apps, the disk cache memory is reclaimed for the apps and I don't hit swap. Huge difference.

Re:The whole idea of upgrading PCs???

[gallwapa]

You bought a machine preloaded from Dell and wondered why it ran like crap? Microsoft was quoted on Slashdot (and I'll paraphrase) as saying OEM's installed 'crapware' that makes it look bad. It was true of XP, and certainly true of XP.

Should you have to do that for a new PC? No. But OEMs have a responsibility to make it work right!