Jason Dunn
08-30-2006, 07:24 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=125' target='_blank'>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=125</a><br /><br /></div>"Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor stumbled across Amazon's Windows Vista pre-order prices today. They've been up for nearly two weeks and no one has noticed...for months, Microsoft has been saying Windows Vista will be ready in January. More recently, a Microsoft product planner let slip that it would be "late January." And January 30 fits that bill. Here's the price list, as charged by Amazon (full/upgrade):<br /><br /> * Windows Vista Home Basic, $199/$99.95<br /> * Windows Vista Home Premium, $239/$159<br /> * Windows Vista Business, $299/$199<br /> * Windows Vista Ultimate, $399/$259<br /><br />All in all, close to what I guessed at yesterday. The Ultimate prices are $50-60 more than I predicted, and the Business edition is $20 higher than I thought - exactly the same price as XP Professional. And for some reason the Home Premium version will set you back $20 more than I thought."<br /><br />Disaster, thy name is Vista pricing. We live in a world where owning more than one computer is a common thing in many computer-using households around the world. The full version pricing doesn't bother me - it's hard to envision a scenario where someone wouldn't be able to take advantage of the upgrade pricing. The upgrade pricing is quite high though - about 20% more than I thought. Vista Home Basic lacks a lot of functionality, so Home Premium is going to be the only one I'll recommend to friends and family. But at $159 USD for a single license, that's quite pricey. <br /><br />The real problem here is the lack of a "family pack" upgrade option: mark my words, this is going to tremendously slow home user adoption of Windows Vista. <a href="http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/6294000/wo/7M3jnyKlYYQP2zU7giv1CzxwNe1/1.0.19.1.0.8.12.1.1.1.13.0">Apple has it figured out:</a> they sell a single user license for $129 USD or a five-user home license for $199 USD. That's simple, cost effective, and $199 USD is a very reasonable price for upgrading five computers to the latest Mac OS.<!><br /><br />Microsoft <i>needs</i> home users to buy Vista, because the big 20,000 seat corporate licensing purchases never happen quickly - hell, many are just now upgrading to Windows XP! I've raised this exact issue - family pack pricing - with Microsoft Vista team members and executives many times, and it evidently has fallen on deaf ears. They just don't seem to know/care, or they feel that family pack licensing would be a threat to their business licensing bundles.<br /><br />I saw this when Windows XP came out: I was at a friends house, doing some general computer cleanup on his Windows 98-based machines, and was urging him to upgrade to Windows XP. He had four computers in the house, and upgrading to XP Home would have cost him over $500. That's not a small amount of money, so he simply said that Windows 98 was "good enough" and he'd stick with it. Windows XP is "good enough" for many people, and there's very real chance that Vista is going to be a flop in the upgrades market for this very reason: multiple-PC households will look at the upgrade pricing and simply say that XP is "good enough".<br /><br />Microsoft doesn't want Vista adoption to be driven solely through new computer purchases, yet that's the exact scenario they've created here with the upgrade pricing and lack of a family pack.