As I noted previously re: Windows Visa Upgrade Pricing, I received some spirited comments and mails.
As I mentioned, I haven’t seen an announcement of UK or EU prices for Vista, but will post a link to them when I see them.
As for the pricing on Vista upgrades on the Windows Vista “Get Ready” site, I was glad to see that there is pricing is at parity with the XP upgrade pricing we see today: that covers our home laptops which stay in the home.
Windows Vista Home Premium includes the features of the current Media Center Edition (MCE), which is fine for our MCE PCs at home, as we don’t require the feature set of Ultimate. Home Premium also includes the the Aero UI and the DVD authoring, and features I won’t take advantage of on our desktop MCE PCs like the Tablet PC UX.
IMHO, a “Family Pack” offering for multiple PCs in a home is an interesting approach that Apple has taken with Mac OSX Tiger (which offers coverage for up to five Macs in a single home: one friend in the Valley with multiple Macs called this his “annual upgrade fee”). Just as I’m able to cover three PCs in our home with an annual OneCare protection and maintenance subscription for SRP$49.95 a year, it’s an interesting value proposition to cover multiple PCs in a home on a household annual license basis. (Note: I found OneCare on sale for $19.95 this past Labour Day weekend, after rebate.)
Tags: Microsoft, Windows Vista, Windows, Vista, Vista upgrade, OneCare.
2 replies on “More on Windows Visa Upgrade Pricing”
Are you a Microsoft employee? How can you support such ridiculous pricing .. $350+ for just OS? Is this the kind of cost savings to the end user when you introduced WPA? Its just bogus!
First: yes, I am a Microsoft employee.
Second, the pricing is somewhat lower than you quoted and mentioned here: for machines which run Windows XP Home, SRP for the Vista Home Basic full package product (which we call FPP) is US$199.00 in the States, and the upgrade retail price is US$99.95, the same as we see today on Windows XP Home. And there are free upgrades for people buying new PCs today.
There are more expensive SKUs, but I find that for my applications, Home Basic meets the need. And some PCs will remain on XPSP2, like one of our kid’s machine that is firewalled and uses parental control software.
On my Media Center, the upgrade will be SRP $159.00, and if current market conditions are any indicator, I’ll find it less expensive at retail… plus I always find that there are various marketing promotions to ease the move to a new OS.