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.'"

I wonder if

[Roadmaster]

great so now all the "early" (2 years+) adopters got screwed, paying more for a lousy product to begin with. I wonder if they'll give a credit to those early adopters, like Apple did when they lowered the price for the iPhone.

That makes sense since consumers are MS employees

[FromTheAir]

I think Microsoft is doing it out of good faith since so many consumers paid money to participate in Microsoft product development. After a lot of work and headache by customers helping Microsoft debug their Vista OS which resulted in SP1. Which is really the first instance of Vista that could come close to a production release.

I still thank Microsoft should be paying people to help debug there software. In some ways they are smart getting people to pay to work for them.

True other third parties contribute to technical problems.

Collective debugging and product development, which sounds a lot like open source, should result in Free software but I am not sure how that fits into Microsoft's business model.

Remember it is all good and a process of evolution, and everything happens for an intelligent reason.

Comparison to Apple

[je ne sais quoi]

Lately I've been seeing a lot of criticism point at Apple when they do the same thing Microsoft does. Let's turn it around, eh? When Apple cut the cost of the iPhone, quite a few people were screaming bloody murder about Steve Jobs and his evilness. So where is the outrage over the Vista price cut? Where is Bill Gates promising to send a rebate to all the people who "overpaid" for their copy of Vista? I'm not trolling here, I suspect the reason is that MS waited just long enough for the sensationalism to fade before they dropped the Vista price whereas Apple didn't wait long enough. Since I haven't bought either of these products, I'm going to have to rely on others who have...

I don't think so

[geekoid]

"I think it is that Linux development is starting to reach a critical mass"

Maybe, but I haven't seen a large trend towards that through the industry.

What I think is happening is that MS as a place to work has been stagnent in the last few years, and MS needs good developers.

There is no opportunity to get rich anymore, there reputation stinks, they have been cutting back on developer perks, but still expect 60+hours a week.

Ballmer is right in that it's about the developers, but MS isn't handling it's transition from skyrocketed company to, a strong but steady market force very well. This is typical. Developers seem more like a commodity that can be swapped around by Accounts. Which is fine,if accountants are tempered with good upper management that backs the developers concerns.

The top management may be deluded and think MS got the great developers it did in the early 90's because it's a great place to work. Instead of a great place to get rich.

I have said this for years, MS will go to an existing OS and brand their GUI on it, or die. You can not turn out a good solid OS in 10 years of development, you also need 10 years of in the market maturity.

I was astounded when Apple did it. Man, that blew me away. It's a good move that will keep you from reinventing the wheel.

Not odd at all

[gilesjuk]

Vista costs twice as much in the UK as it does in the US.

Re:The whole idea of upgrading PCs???

[WeeLad]

I've only had two experiences with Vista. Neither one prolonged. In the first, my brother was showing me the really cool 3d window chooser and how he could scroll through it with the mouse wheel. Then he tried to show me a game, which he had previously installed and played, but which broke because UAC got turned back on somehow and forbid him from using it. But at least he could choose windows in a stylish manner.

The other was a Microsoft presentation of Powershell. They invited some of us Unix people, presumably to humble us or get us to see the light. "I don't know why this is so slow" was repeated by the presenter a few times.

Re:i know whats coming next

[h4rm0ny]

I don't know why someone marked the parent as troll, but it's unfair as this is a reasonable explanation as it both fits the observed fact and there are groups with means and motive to do this. We also have previous instances of this sort of behaviour from these groups and of private companies complicity in such activity (including Microsoft). As to the other poster who discounted this because a hardware solution would make much more sense, that's hardly a solid counter-argument because a hardware solution would firstly be more difficult to implement, crossing multiple areas of hardware requirements and manufacturers in all probability (including manufacturers in countries such as Germany and China), we don't know what companies behind the scenes are amenable to aiding US spying efforts and a hardware solution seems likely to be less flexible.

This is not to say that this is the reasoning behind Microsoft's desperate attempt to get people to take up Vista. A private awareness that if they don't lock people into their O/S using the drm mechanisms in Vista, that they're in serious trouble. Could also be the reason. Or it could be multiple reasons. But certainly the parent shouldn't be modded a troll because it's a strong possibility. Installing subversive software on people's machines is one of the first things that I thought of when I read this article.

Re:Wireless Ubuntu Works

[MrNemesis]

Sssssh! If you tell people that you can use wireless on Linux without having to watch uber-733t text scroll across the screen, no-one here is going to want to use it. I'm sure most people here, like myself, reconfigure X so it only displays stuff in monochrome green and black after being piped through aalib.

The caveat is, of course, that you need a wireless controller with Linux friendly drivers - thankfully, Intel "got it" a long time ago and I've not found a wireless chipset of theirs which wasn't ungeekily simple to get working in Linux; it's companies like Broadcom that give wireless on Linux a bad name, as anyone who's been as frustrated as I have been with ndiswrapper will testify.

There's a (hopefully) useful compatability matrix here: http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ [passys.nl]

Re: Software Antiques

[TaoPhoenix]

So how much before the matted & framed copy of the OS is worth more on the antique market than it was at retail?

Re:The whole idea of upgrading PCs???

[knight24k]

I have never had an issue with preloaded machines from Dell. I have been buying their systems for over 10 years both professionally and personally. This is the first time a pre-loaded OS ran like crap out of the box. There was no other 'crapware' on the system, I checked and uninstalled anything that might have been an issue. I even reinstalled the entire thing without the pre-loaded apps so the only thing running was Vista and it still ran like crap until I disabled UAC, turned off Aero and set the system to performance with Windows Classic GUI.

Vista is a bloated, overpriced piece of garbage. It offers absolutely nothing over XP and does not perform as advertised even on a high end dual core system with 4gb of ram installed. BTW, Dell replaced the entire system thinking it was a hardware issue and the 2d system ran the exact same way. It wasn't until I disabled the bulk of the bloat that the system became usable.

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[account_deleted]

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Ausus EEE? Vista and Microsoft are over.

[gnutoo]

You have to be sleeping to have missed free software's 2007 surge and proof of concept. Dell, IBM and Asus all did well with it on "consumer" desktops. If the Asus EEE PC meets sales goals, there will be more EEEs out there than Macs. So far, the EEE has exceeded sales goals handily. You only need a few home runs like that to have GNU/Linux break into double didgit market share, which would also eclipse Vista. Microsoft has launched this firesale to prevent that but it's too little too late. Every vendor is going to pile on to the new, profitable model and Microsoft will never recover. They lost their "cool" factor and will soon lose their perception of practicality. Non free software can't compete with free, even when you give it away.