Windows Vista Ultimate Edition Pricing WTF



  • Ok so decided to see how much Vista is gonna cost me over here in Ireland and figured at least Amazon would have a price out, so went there and had a look

    Amazon.com: Price USD$<FONT color=#990000>379.99 </FONT><FONT color=#000000>For America</FONT>

    Amazon.co.uk: price GBP£<FONT color=#990000>369.99 </FONT><FONT color=#000000>For us here in Europe, which is approx USD$</FONT><FONT color=#990000>725.09</FONT><FONT color=#000000> accoring to xe.com</FONT>

    Thats a 90% icrease in price for us europeans. WhyTF do we have to pay so muc F'in more here for an OS???? It's just crazy 



  • that's the way money conversion goes in software licences. 1$ = 1€ = 1£ = 1whatever.  The price does not matter, only the number.

    That, or europe has to pay for the various trials of microsoft VS european government... 

     

    At least for the 1$ = 1€ conversion, am sure of it :D

    And i won't be surprise the ultimate edition would coste 800 € here, as 400 € looks like a normal non-oem price for a microsoft product. 



  • This is going to sound like an advert, so I'll say now that I am not being paid in any way for this post!


    Amazon isn't exactly known for their software prices (they seem to charge "store" prices, rather than "internet" prices), at overclockers.co.uk you can get the OEM version of Vista Ultimate for ~£135 (~$265). 

    AFAIK UK law allows OEM products to be sold to anyone (IANAL).

    Besides, here in the UK we are always paying 30-70% markups, Microsoft products seem particularly expensive. More reasonable prices can usually be found online.



  • Vista in itself is a WTF. Looks to me like the most awaited uber-bloat of all time. May anyone convince me I am wrong?



  • @Tweenk said:

    Vista in itself is a WTF. Looks to me like the most awaited uber-bloat of all time. May anyone convince me I am wrong?

    This is one of the most fair reviews I've seen dealing with Vista, especially is such detail that he goes into:

    Paul Thurrott: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista.asp



  • Maybe this is Microsoft's payback for the EU fining them €500 million for doing nothing but bundling useful software with thier own operating system?  I'm no MS fanboy by a longshot, but come no.



  • @Pap said:

    Maybe this is Microsoft's payback for the EU fining them €500 million for doing nothing but bundling useful software with thier own operating system?  I'm no MS fanboy by a longshot, but come no.

    The fine was mainly for unfair cometition, not releasing full API and protocol specs. After much foot-dragging they have finally got around to releasing those, although AFAIK they are not available to the public yet.

    Secondly, this is no "punishment". The markup is similar to other Microsoft products.
    I don't think Microsoft would be stupid enough to punish their customers for the actions of their governments.



  • @mallard said:

    I don't think Microsoft would be stupid enough to punish their customers for the actions of their governments.

    So when governments impose large licensing and regulatory costs on top of import duties for every unit shipped, precisely who do you think is supposed to pay for that?



  • That is called taxation. I was talking about a fine. Fines should not be (directly) passed on to customers, but taken from profit. Taxes necessarily have to be passed on to customers.



  • @mallard said:

    That is called taxation. I was talking about a fine. Fines should not be (directly) passed on to customers, but taken from profit. Taxes necessarily have to be passed on to customers.

    When you get down to it, "fines should not be passed on" is a bit silly of a thing to say - it's money gone, one way or another, "fine" or "tax". The real difference between a fine and a tax is that the fine is usually a cut-and-dry thing: "pay us $X million dollars" - and not like a tax, which is a per-unit affair. One usually assumes that the company's already operating in maximum-profit mode all the time, so it won't make sense to change prices to the consumers because you've been fined a certain amount - they're already extracting as much as they can. A tax is different, since it's a per-unit cost, and it changes how much they can effectively make per customer, so they can adjust how much they're charging to compensate.

    Not all taxes are passed along to consumers, either. If demand for a product is particularly elastic, relative to the supply, then the producers will be paying more.



  • @tchize said:

    that's the way money conversion goes in software licences. 1$ = 1€ = 1£ = 1whatever.  The price does not matter, only the number.

    That, or europe has to pay for the various trials of microsoft VS european government... 

     

    At least for the 1$ = 1€ conversion, am sure of it :D

    And i won't be surprise the ultimate edition would coste 800 € here, as 400 € looks like a normal non-oem price for a microsoft product. 

    Hehe, I'd love to buy Vista for 399 Russian Rubles - which is about $15 ;-)



  • @fennec said:

    When you get down to it, "fines should not be passed on" is a bit silly of a thing to say - it's money gone, one way or another, "fine" or "tax". The real difference between a fine and a tax is that the fine is usually a cut-and-dry thing: "pay us $X million dollars" - and not like a tax, which is a per-unit affair. One usually assumes that the company's already operating in maximum-profit mode all the time, so it won't make sense to change prices to the consumers because you've been fined a certain amount - they're already extracting as much as they can. A tax is different, since it's a per-unit cost, and it changes how much they can effectively make per customer, so they can adjust how much they're charging to compensate.

    oh, you mean i can't offset my speeding ticket against my tax bill?
     

     



  • @ligne said:

    oh, you mean i can't offset my speeding ticket against my tax bill? 

    No, but you're free to try to charge your employer more for your services to make up the shortfall. 



  • @nuclear_eclipse said:

    This is one of the most fair reviews I've seen dealing with Vista, especially is such detail that he goes into:

    Paul Thurrott: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista.asp

     

    Fair? I tried to read it. I tried to keep an open mind. He begins by saying he is going to concentrate on comparison with vista's main competitor, namely XP. Fair enough, probably true. But the fact of the matter is that the further I read, the clearer it became that the guy was 110% pro Windows. He wouldn't have made a bad review if Vista came packaged on punch cards. You can't convince me that any (non trivial) software product that comes out is perfect. Maybe he gets to the downsides further on in the article, but I as far as I read it was all pro-windows and pro-vista.

     
    I am not inherently anti-windows (I am anti-microsoft, but mainly because of their business practices). I figure, maybe windows fails on certain technical grounds, but it succeeds in making the machine accessible for my 77 year old aunt, who once swore she wouldn't ever have a computer in the house...and I haven't touched her machine for any maintenance ever, it was set up by my non-tech relations. But when I read a review which is only positive...well I hope he got paid for it, otherwise he is just delusional.

     Maybe somebody who actually read the whole review could give a...review. However, I think this 'fair review' reads like either a commercial or fan-fiction.
     



  • @TheJasper said:

    Fair? I tried to read it. I tried to keep an open mind. He begins by saying he is going to concentrate on comparison with vista's main competitor, namely XP. Fair enough, probably true. But the fact of the matter is that the further I read, the clearer it became that the guy was 110% pro Windows. He wouldn't have made a bad review if Vista came packaged on punch cards. You can't convince me that any (non trivial) software product that comes out is perfect. Maybe he gets to the downsides further on in the article, but I as far as I read it was all pro-windows and pro-vista.

     
    I am not inherently anti-windows (I am anti-microsoft, but mainly because of their business practices). I figure, maybe windows fails on certain technical grounds, but it succeeds in making the machine accessible for my 77 year old aunt, who once swore she wouldn't ever have a computer in the house...and I haven't touched her machine for any maintenance ever, it was set up by my non-tech relations. But when I read a review which is only positive...well I hope he got paid for it, otherwise he is just delusional.

     Maybe somebody who actually read the whole review could give a...review. However, I think this 'fair review' reads like either a commercial or fan-fiction.
     

    Perhaps you are correct. Thurrott is historically biased towards Windows, but if you take the time to read the last few sections of the article, especially the piece on the downsides of Vista, you do see that he is not just spouting the company line for Vista. He's simply making the argument that all of the problems that everyone is blaming Vista with, are mostly blown out of proportion. I have tried to find as many reviews of Vista as I could, and Thurrott's is really the one that seems most in touch with reality, and I'm no Windows fan - I have six computers, 4 with Linux, 1 with FreeBSD, and only 1 with Windows XP. But the majority of Vista reviews that I have found are of only two types: either written by a paid writer for a magazine who tailors the review to be favorable to the audience (100% pro-windows or 100% anti-windows), or written by a writer who for open source software, and the review of Vista is even more biased, or correspondingly slammed either over the price, the number of different versions, the "DRM-ed to hell" OS, or the new security dialogs.

    But I digress. If you truly want unbiased information on Vista, you must read articles from every viewpoint, both good and bad, and then draw your own conclusions from what you've read. I personally found Thurrott to be quite open and he refreshingly wrote about Vista in such depth that it required about twenty separate articles to cover everything. I would be hard pressed to find such a detailed review of Vista anywhere else on the net.



  • There is "Part 7: Where Vista Fails", but yes, Thurrott is not the most "balanced" technology reviewer.



  • @TheJasper said:

    However, I think this 'fair review' reads like either a commercial or fan-fiction.

     The line that stuck out to me was "Do not purchase or use Windows Vista Home Basic." I think a true fanboy would have said something like, "Home Basic doesn't have all of the fancy UI features, but it comes with Microsoft's new beefed up security!" or some crap like that to justify all the product editions. I would say it isn't too bad, for a review of Microsoft's baby on a Windows enthusiast site.

    Others: 

    "And Mac advocates can claim, truthfully, that many of Vista's best features appeared first on Mac OS X, sometimes years ago. More problematic, over the past five years, many of Windows Vista's best features have been jettisoned, and it's unclear whether they'll ever appear in future Windows versions."

    (Hmm... Does anyone know what "Premium Games" is? Sounds like "Pinball" to me.) 



  • One thing that leapt out at me from Paul's review was the live icon preview feature, which is supposed to be able to display portions of the contents of documents (at least for the types understood by the system) as icons on the desktop.  Well, Windows XP has this feature too, and for small documents that the system can parse quickly, it's great.  For multi-gigabyte video files it can grind your system to a complete halt for several minutes trying to generate a thumbnail preview!  I don't know whether the feature works any better in Vista, but it definitely lacked some common sense in XP.  Go ahead and be cute if you want, but don't under any circumstances let the UI expend so many resources being cute that the system becomes unusable for oh, say, actual work...



  • I was going to edit that post but I ran out of editing time (what does Alex give me, 30 seconds??)  Well, I was a little simplistic describing XP's preview features.  It has a couple of different ones: one is image thumbnails, which works fairly well (and in the background) although it can require substantial amounts of CPU horsepower and disk bandwidth to generate thumbnails for a directory full of large image files.  The other is a dynamic analysis of various types of files (especially media files) to print statistics on the file in a folder's sidebar when in "live" UI mode (as opposed to "classic" mode).  This is the one that bothered me, because if it is enabled, and you open a folder containing one or more multi-gigabyte video files, you'll have to wait several minutes (!) for the system to swap all of those files into and out of main memory in order to analyze them.  You cannot interrupt this process, and because it uses up all of your memory and disk bandwidth, you cannot effectively do anything else at the same time either.  So the first thing you have to do in XP if you plan to work with large media files is to turn off any "live" UI nonsense.  Will Vista be any better?



  • @stevekj said:

    One thing that leapt out at me from Paul's review was the live icon preview feature, which is supposed to be able to display portions of the contents of documents (at least for the types understood by the system) as icons on the desktop.  Well, Windows XP has this feature too, and for small documents that the system can parse quickly, it's great.  For multi-gigabyte video files it can grind your system to a complete halt for several minutes trying to generate a thumbnail preview!  I don't know whether the feature works any better in Vista, but it definitely lacked some common sense in XP.  Go ahead and be cute if you want, but don't under any circumstances let the UI expend so many resources being cute that the system becomes unusable for oh, say, actual work...

    This XP "feature" gives you a fun way to crash Explorer!  (Well, actually it wasn't fun for me.)  First, install an old version of Roxio Easy Media Creator, or other package that has an old version of the divx codec.  Then copy some new divx files into a directory (for instance from a Pure Digital Point-and-Shoot video camera).  Now every time you open that directory:  whoops!  There goes your desktop.  It just HAD to try to open the divx files to display the timing information.  Too bad the format has changed and the old codec can't handle it.

    Fortunately Explorer comes right back so you can try it again.

     



  • An other interresting analysis about windows vista:

    http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html 



  • its 549 euro's here on the old continent, perhaps i'll order it in the us?

     



  • @mallard said:

    That is called taxation.

    I'm not talking about taxes. I'm talking about additional costs like having to document APIs and deliver specifications, especially when you need a legal advisor to tell you what needs to be documented and how. That gets expensive. Why should American customers pay for that?

     



  • Screw that. There's no way that using equivalence with a currency that sports a 2:1 ratio is remotely anything to do with "oh, we've got to document APIs for these particular people". Just documenting the frigging things in the first place would have saved them millions, but no, they had to be difficult about it. It certainly doesn't equate to a doubling of price.

     If it is possible, it would be interesting to see (as a proportion of population using Windows) how much pirating of Vista occurs in countries where equivalence is so out of whack with reality as compared to the States.
     



  • @tchize said:

    that's the way money conversion goes in software licences. 1$ = 1€ = 1£ = 1whatever.

    If that were true everywhere, I'd go to Japan and buy Vista Ultimate for 379 ¥   :o)



  • @MrBester said:

    There's no way that using equivalence with a currency that sports a 2:1 ratio is remotely anything to do with "oh, we've got to document APIs for these particular people". 

    It's not a question of documenting APIs. It's a question of documenting ALL the APIs.

    See, when I write some software, and I release an API specification, nobody gives a crap whether I've documented every last function that exists. If I neglected to mention something, that's just how it goes. Someone finds it and says "hey, that's not documented" and I say "yeah, that one's complicated and most people really shouldn't use it". But that's not what happens to Microsoft. They get sued for restricting competition. Competition that repeatedly abuses APIs that are well-documented with warnings about what not to do and why not to do it. Competition that doesn't even know enough to understand why CBRS and WS flags should not be combined in the same bit vector.

    So not only do they have to be documented, but they all have to be made safe enough for these retarded morons to use. And that takes time and costs money, and I don't think it's my responsibility to pay for your stupid government making that stupid decision.


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