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Will Windows 7 Cost More than Vista?
May 18th, 2009 by Avram Piltch
In an interview with CNET that was posted yesterday, a Dell marketing executive said that Windows 7 is going to cost more than Vista or XP ($79.95) and that the higher prices may slow adoption.
“If there’s one thing that may influence adoption, make things slower or cause customers to pause, it’s that generally the ASPs (average selling price) of the operating systems are higher than they were for Vista and XP,” Darrell Ward, director of product management for Dell’s business client product group, told CNET. “In tough economic times, I think it’s naive to believe that you can increase your prices on average and then still see a stronger swell than if you held prices flat or even lowered them. I can tell you that the licensing tiers at retail are more expensive than they were for Vista.”
Considering the weakened state of the economy and the strong desire of computer vendors to use Windows 7 as a selling point for new notebooks, anything short of aggressive pricing could hurt holiday sales. Since Microsoft has yet to announce pricing, we’ll have to see what happens between now and the expected October launch of Windows 7.
via Maximum PC
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May 19th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Personally this only seems natural. Inflation is a fact of life, prices rise over time. You can’t expect a product to be sold at the same price point now that it was three years ago. In addition, a free market economy is based on suppply and demand. Based on the massive numbers of RC and beta downloads, and the hype surrounding 7, the demand is there. Why shouldn’t Microsoft make whatever profit they can?
Now, the disturbing part to me is hodar’s comment (nothing personal), that he will again stick with XP. If this does show itself to be a common attitude, then Microsoft may be in a great deal of trouble. Given that most people decide to make any purchase by balancing cost vs. benefit, what features of any upcoming OS will it take for Microsoft to be able to untrench XP. Granted in a way it’s humorous seeing a company having to compete with itself, but if a large number of people don’t want to switch from XP over the course of 2,3, or 4 OS’s, how long can MS afford to continually develop new software that doesn’t sell?