Comments on: Windows 7 Prices

By: Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:30:45 +0000

Thanks Fred. I just checked what "very limited time" means:

There are a limited number of copies available. The offer will end when they're gone, or July 11—whichever comes first.

By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:24:35 +0000

You can preorder the W7 Home upgrade for 49 and the Pro upgrade for 99 right now on amazon. this is for a “very limited time”

By: Lukas Beeler

Lukas Beeler — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:01:28 +0000

Yeah. We will see. I’m still hoping that MS/EU may backpedal on this, but it’s extremely unlikely as of now.

By: Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:55:00 +0000

That’s interesting. I didn’t know that other European countries are also affected by this nonsense.

And you are right, the support issue is probably the biggest problem. I still can’t believe that this is really happening. Obviously, this will cost a lot of money for European companies. I just hope that heads will roll in the EC after this mess.

By: Lukas Beeler

Lukas Beeler — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:47:22 +0000

Yeah. This is probably going to be a support nightmare, with most US-released software never tested and validated on Windows 7 E editions. Which is going to be especially interesting a few years down the line, when calling support

“Yeah, $critical_business_app is broken since update $foo”
“Oh, you’re running Windows 7 E? Sorry, that’s not a supported platform, we can’t help you.”

The best thing is that Microsoft decided it would be best to include innocent countries in this bullshit like Switzerland on the list which get the EU-Edition of Windows 7, which is what i’m especially angry at.

We will see. I hope that we’ll be able to get our hands on Windows 7 E quickly, in order to run testing. We’ve spent a lot of testing our software on Windows 7, which was kinda wasted time.

I also think that many Vendors will choose to only support their software on Windows 7 E with Internet Explorer installed, which also means we’ll have every piece of software coming bundled with IE – just like in the old days.

Yeah, sorry for the rant. But this topic is really annoying the hell out of me.

By: Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:40:01 +0000

Lukuas, I just wonder how USMT will behave if there is no Internet Explorer available on the new machine. I think the fact alone that we have two different Windows strains now will cause troubles of its own.

By: Lukas Beeler

Lukas Beeler — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:27:27 +0000

Given that you can use USMT for many scenarios where inplace upgrades don’t work (XP->7, x32->x64), i’d guess that USMT will work with Windows 7.

Now, i’ve never used Update installs productively and always gone the route of migrating user profiles, but maybe there are people out there that will really miss the upgrade option – i sure won’t.

Internally, we will not deploy x32 versions anymore, and move all our laptops and desktops to an x64 OS. As such, upgrading from Vista to 7 was never an option for us.

By: Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:11:10 +0000

Thanks for the link. It seems my brain works differently. I know about the psychological trick and so I feel annoyed. Sometimes I don’t buy at all then. But I guess it will be different with Windows 7. Not much of a choice here.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:01:43 +0000

Listing it as $299.99 versus $300.00 is all part of psychological pricing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing

It’s an annoying practice that’s been around forever. I just mentally round up when I’m thinking about it.