Microsoft's Lack of Family Pricing

I agree wholeheartedly. In my household, there are three desktops and 5 laptops that i would deem "Vista Capable" (not that microsoft sticker,either) I tried to take advantage of the deal, and it was over. of those machines, all the desktops and 4 of the laptops' owners want vista, but seeing how im the techie, it's my fault that they cant get it cheap. me, i say screw vista until i absolutely have to update, and quite frankly, XP MCE is fine with me. what am i gonna update to? Home Premium, and lose my domain, or Ultimate, and lose a nice big heap of cash and half my software? and i wont update to business, because i like Media center and Vista's solitaire game. so there

on a side note, Microsoft's beta server software? actually quite good. even on my "old" server.

Island Dog, you talk at lot of sense. Microsoft really need to get their PR and Marketing hats on if they are to start turning round their Vista nightmare. They seem to be sitting on their hands praying for a miracle at the moment - and putting a lot of faith in the up and coming SP1 release - but they need to do more and your suggestions are sound from a lot of points of view. The 'boys from Redmond' must not be under estimated and hopefully they will react soon. I hear they were at Digital 2007 the other day and vistitors to the 'Microsoft' arena were not impressed by their lack lustre display. Big opportunity missed but perhaps they have something up their sleve. We'll see.   

I've argued the same points myself, in the past, calling for more sensible family pack licensing of software and operating systems from Microsoft.  As you noted, they just don't get it, and don't see how they could do themselves much more good if they did offer up reasonable pricing of software licenses.

What really gets me is that they, and their defenders, basically argue that they do offer up reasonable software licenses in the form of copies bundled with new computer purchases.  Example, someone can buy a brand new Dell with Vista Home Basic included for lets say $299.00.  If you assume that the copy of Vista was worth the $119 (give or take) that it takes when you buy it on the shelf, then the rest of the purchase has a value of $299 less that $119, except that in reality if you tried to buy the same PC without an operating system you can't, or if you can you save at most something like $25 - $50 total on the price of the package.

Somewhere in there the hardware is discounted or the operating system is discounted, or both have been discounted.  But... it's still not cheap for upgrading 2, 3 or more systems in a household when you start looking at $299 for the first system, then another $299, and then another.  You are faced with the choice of having one PC run Vista while another runs Windows XP, while another might still be using Windows 2000, with the Vista PC replacing an old Windows 98 system or paying a ton of money just in operating system costs (and possibly in the costs of the hardware upgrades, memory, disk drives, video cards, etc., that might be needed to run the newly upgraded OS).

I'd love something like a $400 family plan that would let me install Vista Home Premium on multiple systems.  Not going to happen though, and tends to push me towards thoughts of using Fedora or Ubuntu on systems just so Microsoft doesn't get any money.

For now, I'm running a new laptop with Vista (Home Premium) on it, and a home brew PC that also runs Vista Home Premium as my media center PC.  The laptop came with Vista Home Premium on it, so it's price was factored into the cost of the system.  The home brew PC saw me order the separate copy of Vista Home Premium upgrade so I could upgrade from Windows Media Center Edition 2005.  Why upgrade?  Because I wanted to run a 64 bit OS on my 64 bit hardware.  Too bad the laptop doesn't offer me that choice (it could run the 64 bit version of Vista, but the OEM only ships the 32 bit version on the system )

MS is the biggest gorilla on the block.  Sooner or later you WILL buy theri OS.  Why discount it?  They can wait you out.

That's why they need bringing down a peg or two. Essentially, Zubaz, you're calling MS a monopoly here - that they have the guts and big enough market share to do whatever they like - and this is why the other devs and consumers need to fight back somehow to help level the playing field

I like Vista and other MS products but they're not necessarily competitively priced for families, as say compared to Apple and some of the other software developers, and that's why the two other boxes coming into our household will only have XP Pro on one and Home on the other....OSes we already have.

And this is where Apple is losing a lot of sales by having its OS run only on propriety hardware...I'd happily run OS-X on those other two boxes, otherwise.

Agreed, I bought Ultimate early in it's release (Mid Febuary). It was expensive, but I feel it was worth it as I really love the OS.
With that being said I really think MS should cut the prices in half. They would probably make up the amount lost and then some in overall sales as im sure more people would migrate to Vista.

Speaking of Apple and its choice to keep their customers locked into THEIR hardware.. if they made it open source to compete with MS I really thing the OS as a whole would just fall apart. Hackers would ultimately bring OS X to it's knees.

Beware the penguin!

They are . .but it was created with fair (if very aggresive) business practices.

I was lloking at XP Home for a porn watching, virus catching, OS killing insurance salesman and was shocked to see it was still $200 retail.I have two Ubuntu boxen but I don't see them making any inroads in the next 5 years.  I'll re-evaluate later.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-MS, and they're far from being the 'evil empire', but I would like to see more competitive pricing and products, and not just from MS, but other companies as well. That's when we the consumer has it best, with choice of products and services, etc.

People complain about Apple tying its OS and software to propriety hardware, but in a sense, MS has done the same in reverse...you can buy any brand PC, even custom build one, but your restricted to Windows OSes if you want to remain in the mainstream of computing, particularly if you're a business. That's where it would be great if the various Linux distros were serious competitors to MS and Apple/Mac.



Saw that movie, thought Batman disposed of him.

Yeah, I have to agree with Zubaz here, Linux is a way off being considered mainstream and will take a while to close the gap enough to be in the main race. I tried Ubuntu, and though I found it difficult to navigate/learn as a novice, I'm interested/impressed enough to give it another try. Unfortunately, I needed to uninstall it and wasn't prepared to mess around with setting to give Vista boot priority after reinstalling it, not when I have another box of its own arriving in a few days.



Um, that's where you politely ask to go 'find it yourself'....computers are tools that should NOT be abused in such way, and being a party to it is...well put it this way, I wouldn't want to be involved.

Oh, and before I forget....



I wonder if that's Jobsy's biggest fear, that his OS isn't as secure as he'd like, even moreso on non-propriety hardware. Sounds like something MS has with Windows OSes, a vulnerable system because there'll always be somebody somewhere who'll try to hack it, simply because they can.

Cynical, sad, and unfortunately true.

Arrgg! Ye and yer boats! I knew ye would connect the 2!

Yeah, an' thars gonna be hell ter pay if t'were either of 'em wot run tha 'Sister aground.

Not as long as you might think. Linux's greatest asset is the size of its development team, starkers.

Yes, Linux has a learning curve. But so does Vista. In the end, though, bottom line tends to prevail, and I would not be surprised to see corporations envisioning Xp's obsolescence and supporting Linux developers to prepare for that day.

And Batman? BATMAN? What do you expect from someone who runs around in TIGHTS?!?

IN the end, what will make or break Linux as an alternative is not ease of use (the Mac had it all over windows for many years), but Apps. If Linux is going to be a contender, they have to get some solid commerical apps that can rival those on Windows. You may not want to pay for an OS, but most dont mind paying for Office (reasonably priced) that has good help built in - and a strong and accessible support structure.

And which rights would those be? The purple or the black ones?

Bingo!  And not just the Official support but the neighborhood guy that fixes everyones PC.

It'd be a great day for computing, should Linux get some mainstream support from leading businesses in that regard....it'd put both MS and Apple on high alert and be just the break consumers need.

This kind of competition is exactly what consumers and the OS/software market desperately need to spark the monopolistic companies into being more innovative/less likely to put out half baked systems...to be more realistic with their pricing/marketing practices.



And with his jocks on the outside, too....and isn't it hilarious that it's the people of the original Batman era who are the ones most criticizing the young of today who wear their strides...er, pants so low their arse....um, underwear is hanging out.



Depends which colour underwear he's wearing at the time....pink goes pretty good with purple, so maybe he'd go with the black ones (perhaps the fishnet number) if he were wore his red satin knickers.

I don't know how almost every post about Vista/Microsoft turns into some kind of Linux discussion.  Linux is nowhere near mainstream ready. 

and Batman or Hitler or pirates show up too.

Funky, no?

Very true ID, but then what dull posts these would be in the forums.  

Oh im sure its a very large factor in why he wouldn't go open source. It's been proven that the security compared to Vista is horribly bad. OS X is riddled with flaws, but at the moment really seems to care about OS X...

In this case, being the topic is competitive pricing/family licensing, I think the free 'penguin' Oses were suggested as an inexpensive alternative.

General (geez this bloke gets about) Consensus, however, confirms they are far from ready as being a viable alternative, so I for one, will not mention Linux here again.



LINUX

THE PENGUIN IS COMING FOR YOU