Vista Price Cuts Dissected - Anything But Vista
(Page 2 of 4 )
Most of the opinions I've come across point to the fact I mentioned earlier about how very few people actually update their PCs in the first place. This is a major reason why the vast majority of Vista's sales have come from the sale of new computers with some version of Vista on it. But putting all these factors aside, it's time to look at the actual price of Vista compared with its competitors. In the U.S., the main price cut figures are these (rough estimate): Vista Ultimate (full version) from $399 to $319, (upgrade) from $259 to $219, and the Vista Home Premium upgrade from $159 to $129, which obviously makes it the most "economical" version because it's just $30 more than the Home Basic upgrade.
David DeJean of Computerworld.com argues that the most viable competitor for the Vista Home Premium upgrade is Apple's OS X -- Linux, although much cheaper, is still not as easy to use or maintain. DeJean says, "Today I can buy the 'family pack' retail upgrade of Leopard from Amazon.com for $171.49 and install it on up to five computers. That's $34.30 a copy." If you do the math, the Vista Home Premium upgrade is more than 3.5 times as expensive. However, DeJean notes the major arguments coming from such a comparison. He says, "the PC side will say, $34.30 for Tiger-to-Leopard doesn't buy you nearly as much of an upgrade as XP-to-Vista represents...But then, the Apple side will say, you weren't waiting for six years for better security either."
Perhaps a better question to ask is whether Vista is truly an "upgrade" from XP. I mentioned the hardware issues earlier and these specifically have to do with the compatibility of drivers (recently with the pre-released version of Service Pack 1). Mike Elgan, also from Computerworld.com, seems to think that Microsoft has grown a bit too comfortable in their own shoes. They've taken what's gotten them this far and refused to adapt to what has become a new revolution in UI (see the Windows Mobile OS), banking on the fact that they still dominate the OS market. Elgan says, "The future belongs to what I call the 3G user interface, which replaces flat icons and folders with multitouch, gestures, physics and 3-D."
Apparently what Microsoft is lacking is simplicity. They are going for more features and applications, while still gearing toward customers and vendors' products made over a decade earlier. And what Microsoft isn't doing, their competitors are. According to Elgan, "Apple is eating [Microsoft's] desktop marketshare because they succeed with simplicity and UI elegance. Google might do so with its cell phone UI. And Asus...was able to cobble together a quick and dirty UI for Linux that's way better than Windows Vista for UMPCs."
In the next section, I'll cover an even more embarrassing gaffe having to do with how Microsoft tried to deal with those hardware compatibility issues.
Next: Vista Incapable >>
More BrainDump Articles
More By Michael Lowry
