Dell Indicates Windows 7 Pricing Will Be Higher 485
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.'"
Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then we might be talking about "2009: The Year of the Recession and Linux on the Desktop."
It is called signaling (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
something doesn't add up here... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Cash Cow (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't hold a true monopoly. You see, Microsoft competes with itself.
Windows 7 has to compete with Vista and XP and even 2000. That's tough competition. When I need to run PC apps, XP does everything I need with the least overhead.
I don't know that they are really raising prices (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that Dell doesn't actually come out and say that. They aren't saying "MS is charging us $20 more per copy." They are hinting at it, but hedging their terms. What it smells like to me is Dell wants a better rate than they've been getting in the past, and this is one of the tactics they are using to get it.
Companies posture over pricing all the time, and sometimes publicly. If Dell can get people mad at MS for their high prices, even if the prices are no higher than they normally are, then maybe they get more leverage.
So while I have no inside knowledge of the situation, that's my bet. MS is keeping 7 prices the same, and Dell thinks they should be cut.
Perceived Value (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes if you make it more expensive, people will buy it for that reason alone. They see the higher price, and think that there must be a good reason for it to be a little bit more expensive than the alternatives.
higher pricing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, probably not (Score:2, Insightful)
FUD whether it comes from M$ or from us is still FUD and a disgusting way to attack anyone or anything.
MS has not used those licensing conditions for the better part of a decade (due mostly to the anti trust case), the top 10 vendors have fixed licensing prices from M$ which are not affected in any way by how much linux they sell or whether they put windows on 5% or 99% of computers.
FUD and lies from us is in my opinion even worse than M$, we are supposed to be better than them.
Win7 = OS costs more than reasonable hardware (Score:1, Insightful)
Fsck that. Seriously. Fsck. That.
2010 = Year of Ubuntu on Joe Sixpack's computer, when he discovers that he can buy a netbook for less than the cost of a single Windows 7 license.
Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn that's some mighty smelly bait. I hope no one is foolish enough to actually take it and respond seriously to it... it will just make the entire thread sick.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Nah, remember that Microsoft gets paid for the number of computers sold, not for the number of Windows licenses sold.
Therefore, even if you want an Ubuntu install, Dell would not give you a discount
NO they don't, that is an outdated practise they did back in the 90's/early 2000. OEM's are all on volume based selling now, this hasn't been an excuse for linux's failure to sell for 5+ years now.
Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:0, Insightful)
And it's easier for Dell to automate Windows installs + app installs on Windows. And it's cheaper for dell to support windows. So the cost for the linux option won't necessarily come down by the sticker price on the windows box.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Even if MS got $200/computer (which I doubt); a downgrade would be the cost of MS software - support costs for Linux. While the OS may be free; supporting it is not and will require Dell to factor those costs in as part of the option. Depending on the cost of the number of units they would expect to sell the cost for Linux per unit may actually be higher than for MS software.
Every time they change hardware they'd have to test to see if Linux supported the new configuration properly and fix any issues before they released the machine (in theory at least; after all we are talking about a hardware vendor here); and any release any mods back to the community essentially being a free development resource for other companies to boot. Why would Dell want to get into the driver business anyway?
It's a bit of the chicken and the egg - Dell needs vendors to support their hardware before Linux is mainstream enough for them, vendors need manufacturer demand to make developing drivers worthwhile.
Finally, if Dell or HP were really serious about using a free OS why not go with BSD and keep any improvements to your self, like Apple does? In theory, if it was a good enough OS they could sell it separately as well.
Re:Cash Cow (Score:4, Insightful)
When I need to run PC apps, XP does everything I need with the least overhead.
As long as you don't need more than 4GB of addressing space...
Small business (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Microsoft charges more and more, yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux remains free of value to noob consumers that are already confused when the colors of their Word icons change.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Cash Cow (Score:4, Insightful)
It's only tough competition because Microsoft hasn't brought anything new to the table with their OSs in the past decade.
The trap Microsoft got themselves into was behaving if they were approaching the classic monopoly endgame. Capitalism requires constant improvement, otherwise customers will buy competitors' products, but once you own the market, there's no point continuing to improve your product. For software, improving your product is almost the ONLY significant cost, so when you want to maximise profit, you stop development.
Microsoft did that. They took their foot off the pedal and relaxed. Now that freeze on innovation is coming back to bite them.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly you've never dealt with Windows on Dell systems. They have to customize that install and reinstalling results in pain most of the time.
For one, those Broadcom wired NICs and Intel wireless NICs so popular on the Optiplex and XPS M#### lines? Not plug 'n play. I used to have to keep a USB flash key with those drivers before I slipstreamed an OEM disc with those drivers.
And support? Well, I don't know about windows persay, but 99% of the hardware calls I make result in "load the diagnostic partition and read me back the error code." Anyway, they could just say 'No operating system support' if they really wanted to.
Now...what Dell would REALLY lose is the bundling. McAfee or Norton (whichever is their default) and whatever flavor of the month toolbar and Roxio and Sonic would be left in the dust and that would end up bringing up the price of the system.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Commodore, There are just too many variables to consider. That Mac OS dates back from 2002. Its hardware specs could even be older than 2002. Your friend (or his family) could have accidentally damaged it, poured coffee into it, or whatever...
Personally, I still have a Windows laptop that runs Windows Me. It can play youtube videos, yes (sort of), but it can't update itself -- it can't update its Internet Explorer (It hasn't been able to for a couple of years). And it can't do a number of things that most computer users would now take for granted. It's basically just a piece of crap that I reserve for family members when they come and visit.
And while I agree that your parent post should have never been modded down into -1 flamebait status, I think you're expecting too much from a machine that was just given to you for free after it stopped working properly in the first place.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. One of the advantages of buying pre-installed OSes is that the OEM has done customizations and additional system testing with all the hardware configurations they are selling. Dell also sets up DVD playback and covers the license, which is one more thing that will "just work" when you buy from them. They do the same for Windows, but as a percentage of sales, it will cost more to offer a second OS, regardless of what it is.
That said, I do look forward to more people getting their distributions this way. So many of the Linux-not-ready-for-the-Desktop arguments fall flat on their face when it's installed properly.
Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't you drop the $60 bucks on 10.3 disks? You can generally skip a few versions of Mac OS X, but you have gone over board. The Mac OS market isn't big enough for most companies to support that antiqued OS regardless. Bitch if you want, but that is how it is. A lot of core APIs were still forming then which exasperate things.
When open source projects start only supporting back to Mac OS 10.4, you know you have a problem. It means there aren't enough people out there. If you're brave, you can try porting FF3 to Mac OS 10.2. That is what people did with Mozilla on Mac OS 9 for a while. But it's much more fun to bitch, isn't it?
Wishfuil thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
No one has to get the latest Windows7? Oh, yes, because we hate Vista we need to buy Windows7. Nonsense. Hardware prices are going down, and so will software. And here also Linux comes into play. Desktop Linux does not need to become a reality it is just necessary to strategically invest in alternatives. Asus is a perfect example.
Re:Windows 7 still better than OS X 10.2 (Score:2, Insightful)
Biggest effect is on Netbooks (Score:2, Insightful)
The biggest effect will be on Netbooks. Windows did not start making up a large portion of netbook os sales until the price for xp was lowered. With this sudden rise in prices you will see a move back to Dell's Ubuntu.
Re:No, probably not (Score:3, Insightful)
One is that MS gives you better licensing when you bundle Windows with all systems from a line.
Yes, restraint of trade by a monopoly and should be illegal.
It would be a tech support nightmare if they did that on main stream, consumer systems.
No it wouldn't. They could easily do it, it just requires slightly more work than "here's an option".
Maybe:
Not hard or expensive. The biggest problem is M$ monopoly vendor manipulation via price manipulation and the economic network effect, both of which have absolutely nothing to do with the quality or otherwise of the product itself.
Like all monopolies in the absence of market forces their should be government supervision and price controls but unfortunately by historical accident that hasn't happened so far in the software industry. The amorphous and active nature of software in particular and "IP" in general means that it is far too easy to do Hollywood style creative accounting and to play games with pricing.
---
I want a free and open market. Do you?
Be careful of what you wish for (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe the Linux community doesn't really want the hoi polloi using Linux.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep on "praying" or "holding on to making it happen"...
Are you writing printer drivers for linux for these walmart "all in one" printers?
Are you paying developers or donating gear? How about buying a few of these printers yourself and helping out.
And before you call me a hypocrite, I did what I preached. Back in '98-99, I worked in IBM's Storage Subsystems Group, and with a stack of Brocade 2800s and handful of Emulex LP7000s and Qlogic HBAs, I troubleshooted HBA issues with IBM and LSI logic disk subsystems. I didn't write code, but I was QA for a the one or two developers and the folks at UNH's Interoperability Lab.
Re:Never worked with many systems? (Score:2, Insightful)
In most cases, you don't even need to do that with Ubuntu.
Aside from having separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions, the one Ubuntu OS image should boot on all supported hardware. It does not store hardware state, ships with a full set of drivers and auto-detects everything at startup.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is you can attach a large volume behind the windows purchase, while you can't attach that volume to the linux purchase. The question they ask themselves is will it pay out?
If they want to sell lucrative support contracts with every purchase, they want to make sure they can make money on them ;)
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Insightful)
To turn it into a productive tool, you need to spend several hundred more dollars
Really? You got robbed, then. I paid nothing for Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Paint.net, VLC, Pidgin, DVDStyler, etc.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:2, Insightful)
FREE-PC.COM was created by Idealab [wikipedia.org] that used to exist in the late 1990s, when they started a bunch of Dot-COMs. It offered free PCs to individuals who agreed in exchange to use the PC at least 10 hours per month.
Free PCs were sponsored by advertisers, and ads were visible at all times. They shipped 30k+ units in 1999, their last year of operation.
They were merged [cnet.com] with eMachines.
And about 5 years ago, eMachines got absorbed by Gateway.
There were some other companies to do similar [slashdot.org] things. And AOL has been infamous [ripoffreport.com] for "free computer" with long locked-in [redorbit.com] AOL subscription deals [itbusinessedge.com].
There are even a few [slashdot.org] references to Free PC/Free-PC on slashdot...
But I don't see any articles about it anymore. Perhaps the archives didn't go back farther than the year 2000??
it will just help the price (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just Dells message to Microsoft telling them they will not eat a higher wholesale cost. They are swinging the bat they have to make MS lower the licensing costs.
Good for them.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? That's not been my experience. Nor, might I add, has it been the experience of most of the people who've experimented with Linux by booting from Live CDs. They Just Work, well over 90% of the time. They may not have the fancy drivers needed to get the optimal performance out of some of the video cards, but they work well enough to get you going until (and unless) you decide to install it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Win7 = OS costs more than reasonable hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's FAR better leaving the machine switched on for 9 months, then on reboot, having to wait 7 hours for the filesystem to repair itself.
Go fsck yourself
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:1, Insightful)
The pink unicorns called.
They want their fairy dust back.
The real problem with linux is that it staunchly refuses to support a standard application binary interface. the result is a tangled ratnest of competing, and redundant apis, and applications which have dependencies and compatibility issues with other apis, and that it becomes a moving target for compile once, run everywhere software and drivers.
take for instance, the dreaded linux sound framework. do you use alsa, OSS, PulseAudio, SDL, or some other audio framework? --Because each one is a different beast in and of itself.
Now, compare to windows: DirectSound api, and Legacy Wave-mapper API. At least a 50% reduction in possible targets.
Now, assume you are a soundcard maker, and want to make drivers for your device. Which target do you most focus on-- one that constantly changes the abi for the pure purpose of hindering custom tailored compile once, run everywhere binaries--- or, do you go with the one that bends over backward for binary compatibility?
Hmmmmmm...
I wonder which the manufacturer will make drivers for...... Hmmm...
The end user is not concerned about if they can get access to the source code. they are concerned about if they can go to the manufacturer for support, instead of either 1) making the driver themselves, or 2) relying on the altruism of others to make a driver for them.
There is something to be said about being an OEM, and essentially telling your customers "We cant support that, you have to find that yourselves."-- you can't do that and expect to stay in business.
That is why OEMs predominantly make windows drivers, and why windows is the most popular platform for home electronics gizmos. It also is why Windows is very popular with people with short amounts of patience, which these days, is a growing percentage of the population.
And that, is why linux adoption on netbooks is falling sharply.
Re:Now If We Could Just Get ... (Score:3, Insightful)