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Posted on May 18th, 2009 by Jon Honeyball
Time for Microsoft to name its Windows 7 price
A few months before the launch of Vista, a very senior person at Acer spilled the beans to me in a one-on-one press briefing held in Taipei, that Acer was going public with its criticism of the Vista pricing model, and that it felt it had no choice but to swallow the cost for putting Vista Home Premium onto its products rather than Vista Home Basic. Apparantly, Home Basic was the same cost as XP Home, and Vista Home Premium was some $20 more.
My news story went round the world like wildfire. It even ended up being quoted in court documents for the class action suit against Microsoft over the claim that Vista Home Basic wasnt really “Vista” due to all the things that were missing.
At the time it was clear – Acer wanted to get the story out about Vista pricing, and it poked its head above the parapet. Third-party hardware vendors have a rocky relationship with Microsoft – would you want to negotiate with Ballmer?
This time round it’s Dell which has gone public about Windows 7 costs. It hasn’t done this randomly; right now, behind the scenes, there’s a skirmish on an epic scale going on between Microsoft and its “partners” on exactly how much they should pay per licence.
Note that Microsoft still hasn’t said what the costings of the product will actually be. And you can bet that the OEM prices will bear little resemblance to the shop price. But nevertheless, it’s Dell who is having a squeak this time around.
The problem is that, once again, Microsoft is playing its cards too close to its chest. I can understand why it doesn’t want to absolutely commit to a release date, but until we hear some concrete, good news about the price, we’re only going to hear bad news about the cost. And that could undo much of the excellent work of the programming team.
Tags: acer, Dell, Microsoft, Windows 7
Posted in: Windows 7
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7 Responses to “ Time for Microsoft to name its Windows 7 price ”
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May 18th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
But why would it say how much Dell are paying? They, and probably HP, shift more machines than any other manufacturer, therefore they will be getting a better deal than, say, Lenovo or Acer, who get a better deal than Asus, who get a better deal than Medion, who get a better deal than YoYo Tech, who get a better deal than the system builder who builds a few machines a month or year, who get a better deal than retail…
My guess is that the prices for retail will stay pretty much the same, but they are trying to renegotiate with the big names, because they are, currently, selling less than expected.
Variable pricing, depending on the number of units you purchase. In the current recession / depression / economic crisis, whatever, the big OEMs will be shifting fewer PCs, so they will be buying fewer licences from Microsoft, so Microsoft will be trying to bump the unit price to the larger OEMs to make up the difference. The same will probably apply to Intel, nVidia and other component manufacturers, their unit prices will probably also be climbing for Dell and HP, because they are ordering fewer units… Which means Dell will have to raise their prices.
It is a vicious circle, the butt stops with the customer, but if we are buying fewer PCs, the manufacturers are buying fewer components, so they are paying more per component than before, and Windows *is* just another component of a complete PC.
This probably also explains why most of the smaller manufacturers, here, are advertising their PCs without the cost of Windows included, they will sell you a PC with Windows installed, if you want, but you’ll have to pay another €120-150 on top of the advertised price.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
All I can say is that the price for upgrading from Vista had better be pretty negligible and certainly much lower than the price for upgrading from XP! If they kick those of us who have born the Vista pain by charging us the same as the XP hold-outs it will be the end of any good will I have left for Microsoft!
May 19th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Personally, I’d like to see all those who have suffered Vista be given a free upgrade to W7. The cost to M$ would be minimal as they rake it in with new PC sales, boot Vista into touch and save on the costs of keeping two to three OS’s running concurrently. It ain’tgoing to happen so I guess I’ll just keep taking the medication.
May 19th, 2009 at 9:51 am
And what about those of us that use Vista, but don’t suffer? :-S
May 20th, 2009 at 10:10 am
@John Hind
Couldn’t agree more. I’m really hoping that an upgrade from Vista will be cheap enough for me to afford. Drives me crazy every time I have to do anything with my home laptop.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:22 am
Absolutely!
I spashed out on Vista x64 to make better use extra procs. and memory on a new AMD home build…… LOL – Well – that lasted 3 months, and after many BSODS and incompatibility issues I’m now back on XP – resource constrained, but no longer suffering.
MS “Blista” DVD – Anyone?
May 24th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
MS will charge whatever they deem fit to cover their cost. Thats the bottom line. They may try to hike the cost a bit (in comparison to Vista) to take advantage of the expectation in the market. They may lower the cost to create more good will (and as an apology to those who have been badly burned by Vista) and close the market even more to other OSes.
Then again they may not.
Chances are that someone out there will get hold of the final release before anyone else, rip it and then send it out via p2p with a jolly old snub to MS.
It would be nice if MS would release an easy W7 upgrade version for Blista users and it would also be nice if their proprietary system was not ripped and sent out, causing them to raise the prices to cover lost revenue. But this is not a nice world. And they are an aggressive corporation…thus only time will tell if they are sensible and listen to what the market and their consumers are saying.
Time will tell…