Windows 7 pricing announced: cheaper than Vista | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 pricing announced: cheaper than Vista

arstechnica.com

10 pointscsomar22 comments

I love the comments here and elsewhere... MS sets the price of Windows 7 around or a little lower than the price of Leopard, and everyone makes smart remarks about "no family pack" and "it would cost $4 bajillion to upgrade my houses 8 family computers". I feel sorry for MS now... even when they do something nice, they're still wrong.

Comparisons to Snow Leopard are particularly unfair... If you don't pay the full price for Snow Leopard, you paid the full price for Leopard! How is that actually cheaper again?

Not to mention the fact that Apple can freely move costs among its hardware and software because they're selling all of it, for example charging more for RAM and less for OS X. MS has to make the money on its software.

-- A happy XP user since 2001, who supports and can use any other newer operating system, but likes XP.

>MS has to make the money on its software.

MS makes it's money on server and Office licenses. Profit on retail sales of Windows are minimal

If they set an extremely low price or even gave away Windows, would that not make Office seem more expensive by comparison?

Honestly, I think the main reason why Snow Leopard is so cheap is due to the fact that Apple wants to reduce support costs for old versions of OSX. By lowering the price for the newest version, pretty much every Mac user is going to be running the exact same version, significantly lowering the support costs for old versions.

Price is one issue, but what they really needed to reduce is the number of variations, to end the confusion.

I suppose any reduction is good, but $10 isn't much for something purchased every few years (or simply bundled on an expensive new machine), especially when it comes from a company that could easily afford to give the OS away for free.

Inflation adjusted this a ~15% price drop from the initial cost of Vista. But, the real shocker is the preorder price of Windows 7 Home Premium ($49.99) and Windows 7 Professional ($99.99).

... the time-and-quantity-limited pre-order price; more of a marketing maneuver than a price cut.

Frankly the boxed OS prices for Windows are moot.

Individuals get the new OS license with the new computer and businesses go through resellers. 7 isn't any 'cheaper' than Vista for any significant number of Microsoft's customers.

I completely agree that for most people this is a non issue, however this is HN where building your one system or upgrading the OS is a real possibility. And the price drop was large enough that I am going to preorder Windows 7. So I felt it was worth highlighting.

Sure sure. If you're 'in the market' it's good to know.

Honest question though: How many people do you know who still build desktops? It seems everyone I know has gone laptop + external monitors in the past few years. (with hand-built 'server' machines all running linux)

If you're in the Windows world and use VS then a laptop won't do... unless you're a masochists

If I have time, I'll finish two desktops by the end of the week, upgrading mine and building another for a relative with spare parts. I also know quite a bit of gamers that build their own desktops too.

There are a lot more PC gamers than it might seem. They don't do laptops.

> especially when it comes from a company that could easily afford to give the OS away for free.

I don't know if this is true. Microsoft would have a very hard time keeping their revenue and profit where they are, much less growing them, which is what the street wants to see, if they gave away their OS.

If they suddenly lost their OS revenue the stock would take a dramatic hit, I doubt they could afford to do this.

Given that they can't afford the hit on their stock price that loosing their OS revenue would bring, can you show how they can afford this?

Microsoft's revenue has increased consistently for its entire lifetime, until recently (Q1'09). [1] In other words, for 23 years, their revenue has gone up every quarter, and even though it "dropped" in Q1 it was still 13.65 billion dollars for a single quarter. About $3.4B of that is from their client division that sells Windows.

Windows isn't the only revenue that counts (e.g. people may not upgrade other software either, if they haven't upgraded Windows). And revenue isn't the only effect on long-term viability. They are no doubt spending a lot to maintain Windows right now. If they gave a free upgrade to Windows 7, they could pretend Vista doesn't exist and eliminate most of its support costs; simply tell all customers that Vista will not be supported because Windows 7 is free and is compatible.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/23/microsoft-rev...

> If they gave a free upgrade to Windows 7, they could pretend Vista doesn't exist and eliminate most of its support costs; simply tell all customers that Vista will not be supported because Windows 7 is free and is compatible.

That sounds nice in theory. In practice there are many companies that change OS's very slowly as it cost alot of money and time to test internal apps and systems on each new OS.

I'd bet that even if Windows 7 was free there would be a substantial client base that would still stick with Vista, XP and 2000 because they don't want to have to upgrade thousands of computers.

It's too bad there couldn't be just one version of Windows 7 that is configurable instead of the "Home Premium", "Business" and "Ultimate" options. I know this has been debated quite a bit before when Vista was released, but I was hoping Microsoft would simplify things a bit with Windows 7.

The different versions cost different amounts of money. What do you mean by one configurable version? How would people buy it?

Also you can see the official post: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/06/25...

Still more expensive than my operating system.

Backflips on to a motorcycle, screeches tires and zooms away

Ok, this is no reddit and you should be downvoted. But I won't do it because I got the joke: http://xkcd.com/272/

Well actually I think I made a valid point, I just put in that quip at the end because I thought it was relevant commentary. I basically said there are less expensive alternatives that I believe are better, and yes I do realize my zealotry is slightly naive and/or ridiculous out of context but is entirely relevant in regard to pricing of said operating system.

Win7 home premium full retail $199

$200 for an OS?

You got to be kidding me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com