Expect Vista to Cost Significantly Less than XP
This link is a bit old now, but it appears that PC users can Expect Vista to cost significantly less than XP. I wonder if this has anything to do with Apple’s OSX making the move to the Intel plaform and the consitantly low price of the Apple operating system? Let’s hope that Apple can provide some real competition in the OS marketplace - much like what we’re seeing now with Microsoft and IE7, RSS, Office formats, etc. Bring on the competition and the ensuing innovation!
I noticed Dell was selling two identical PC, save for the operating system - one had Windows XP, the other had none. The one with XP cost £10 less!
So windows is already effectively free with new computer purchases, if competition heats up, we might see it become explicitly free for all installs.
For that level of competite action, I think MacOS would need to be provided for free also - I’m wondering if there is any incentive for Apple provide it for free.
Well OSX is free if you buy a new Mac. However it is purchasing a new OS without a new PC where the price difference is huge. $99 of OSX and a couple of hundred for XP.
There is a lot of inertia there when it comes to operating systems - I think in order for OSX to start to gain traction, Apple is going to have to
a) make it free
b) put it on a bootable liveCD
c) give it away AOL style, pressing it into people’s hands and saying ‘here, try it out on your PC, you might like it better’
Will they though?
But aren’t there six or seven different levels of Vista?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050910-5298.html
Starter Edition, Home Basic Edition, Home Premium Edition, Professional Edition, Small Business Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition.
Maybe one or two of those will have a lower price point than XP, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the higher editions would be much more expensive.
How many versions of XP? Last time I checked, OSX had one version. No crippled, limited versions. You want to run a file server - no problem. You want to run a web server with unlimited virtual hosts? No problem. Or how about this, our operating system is sooooo complex, we need to give the users a really dumbed down version that we’ll call “Home” edition. I prefer Apple’s method of “hey our operating system works so well, anyone can use it!”
Don’t get me wrong - I use Windows 95% of the time, so I’m not trying to bash MS.
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