What no-one has mentioned that I find interesting, is that Microsoft are calling this a 'promotion' "This upgrade promotion for Windows 8 Pro both online and at retail runs through January 31st, 2013." I wonder why this price is only temporary, and what the price will be afterwards?
All such deals are offered as "promotions" to the start of the next year. They merely get extended ("through January 31st 2014") as a legal formality once the date is hit.
Essentially it's the Legal department's requirement.
The Mac OS X price is essentially also an "upgrade" price because you can only install it on Macs (which already have OS X installed).
Except that I can install OS X on a blank hard drive when needed (which I've needed to do twice).
You can install the MS upgrades on a blank hdd too, can't you? It's been some years but I thought they just used to ask for a disk from the "qualifying upgrade" product to be inserted during install.
I have a hard time imagining that many Windows 7 users are eager to upgrade to Windows 8 on their desktops and laptops, given the drastic changes catering to touch interaction, bringing them little apparent value at best, and significant lost productivity and frustration at worst. My Windows 7 box is for gaming and productivity (not necessarily in that order), and after all I've seen of it, I wouldn't touch Windows 8…
Have you actually used Windows 8? I don't make much use of the metro apps, but there are lots of smaller improvements that I appreciate, like the new task manager, file copy dialog, login screen, etc. The sight of the new start screen incites revulsion in most power users, but try to remember that you won't be spending much time there. Treat the start screen like what it really is: a fancier start menu. Like me, you'…
Spend a little time on Explorer, while you're at it. Just look at Explorer's View menu / task pane thing, and the icon size selector. It's a teeny weeny scrollable box (just barely big enough to fit up and down scroll arrows) with 6 items visible, but only containing 8 items overall! Just look at that thing!
> Lets be clear; this has little/nothing to do with apple. You can't spend $40 to switch to the latest OSX on your regular PC, so it is just not direct competition. I can't use Chevy parts in my Honda, but if Chevy started charging 1/10th of what Honda is charging for similar parts, Honda would need to lower prices if they wanted me to stick with them for my next car, or to use genuine Honda parts instead of third pa…
I completely reject that anyone who would have paid $x for a windows upgrade has then decided not to because of the price of OSX upgrade . It's either worth it for them, or not. Lowering the price simply increases the number in the first category. And your forced car analogy is seriously flawed.
The analogy went some way to showing how the argument based on there being "no direct competition" is a fallacy.
I find it very hard to believe that MS hasn't had a good look at Apple's OS X pricing strategy before making this move. It mightn't be that they feel pressured into lowering the price so much as they've just seen what Apple has done and think it's a good idea to get as many people to upgrade as possible.
I'll use it in a VM until the dev tools I work with start to support it, then I'll go all in. It is always the same thing when a full OS update comes, this is not any diff from the others. I'll keep my linux machines handy on the side as always. I don't see what the ten-foot pole security counter measures bring to the table at this point.
The pole is to keep that cluttered ribbon interface away from my relatively clean Explorer windows, the touch-centric gestures away from my mouse-driven desktop, and to ward off the mental expense of context changes as my environment switches between the classic desktop with classic apps, the start screen and various metro apps.
Hey, I skipped ME and Vista, that is why the VM gets a whirl first. We shall see.
What no-one has mentioned that I find interesting, is that Microsoft are calling this a 'promotion' "This upgrade promotion for Windows 8 Pro both online and at retail runs through January 31st, 2013." I wonder why this price is only temporary, and what the price will be afterwards?
Often legal will ask for this kind of wording so they have an out if they want it later. So it may be more future proofing than an expectation of price changes next year.
It's a smart price but I suspect that Microsoft has burned too many bridges for most people to ever consider upgrading their computer's operating system. For the average person a (Windows) operating system upgrade has traditionally been cost prohibitive and often not a smooth process. That's going to scare a lot of people off even at $39.99 I'm also not convinced Microsoft has found a compelling way to sell Windows 8 yet. There's no one button buy/install option here. People will have to go seek out the software and justify the price tag to themselves. That's going to be an up-hill battle. I'm betting the percentage of users upgrading will be about the same as previous Windows releases.
I have a hard time imagining that many Windows 7 users are eager to upgrade to Windows 8 on their desktops and laptops, given the drastic changes catering to touch interaction, bringing them little apparent value at best, and significant lost productivity and frustration at worst. My Windows 7 box is for gaming and productivity (not necessarily in that order), and after all I've seen of it, I wouldn't touch Windows 8…
Have you actually used Windows 8? I don't make much use of the metro apps, but there are lots of smaller improvements that I appreciate, like the new task manager, file copy dialog, login screen, etc. The sight of the new start screen incites revulsion in most power users, but try to remember that you won't be spending much time there. Treat the start screen like what it really is: a fancier start menu. Like me, you'…
I'll upgrade when they give us more than 2 inches to edit the PATH environment variable.