Maybe you will be interested in...for my purchased price of $1095 because of Bing Cash Back from Microsoft.
Consider yourself fortunate, because
Bing Cash Back is dead, so that discount no longer applies for new purchasers, and should be eliminated from what may be represented (or inferred) as typical.
Pretty much all OEM PCs come with an operating system installed. Most of the time, this is Windows 7 Home Premium. I've rarely ever seen any PC, even a professional-grade one, installed with Professional or Ultimate as a matter of course. I find it annoying that all these computers automatically come with crippled versions of Windows, when with Macs, there's only
ONE client version. If I want Windows, I don't want to spend money on an OEM PC and then pay Microsoft about half the price of the computer to 'unlock' the rest of my Windows features.
In Microsoft's defence, they're not charging $500 for Office 2011.
Im glad you are able to see through his ******** $500 comment.
As for the OS, you can usually pay to upgrade it when you build the computer, but I dont see much need for anything over Home Premium to 99% of the home user population. And yes, the business computers usually start with professional in the customization or when purchased pre configured.
As far as I see it, MSFT can either charge everyone more for 1 version or spread the costs over mutiple tiered versions. I prefer the latter. Its not like 3 versions are hard.
Starter (Not a choice to consumers)
Home (Home)
Professional (Office)
Ultimate (Someone who wants Bitlocker)
The disconnect with both of these is fairly subtle. I'll work the OS one here first:
The problem that Windows has is that its trying to sell to both the personal home market and the business/professional market, and Microsoft has a dilemma in that they can't demand too high of a price for the home/personal, but they also can't give away business-centric features figuratively for free, since that would severely hurt corporate profits.
The good news...in a way... is that they've finally homogenized to basically a single product that has various stuff disabled. This approach streamlines their cost of software development (versus maintaining two independent sets of code, etc).
However, a problem with this approach is similar to one of GM's problems: one car being sold at different price points by Chevy, Pontiac, Buick, Olds and Caddy, with higher trim levels...and knowledgable customers also know that this is their situation. This results in a balancing act for MS where it is seeking to maximize each segment sales (thus profits) without going too far and hurting itself through inter-segment canabalization, all while it also has its support costs increased because they're being burdened down by having to maintain physcial and logical inventory control over these same permutations of the same basic product.
The basic reason why Apple can be different with OS X is because of a combination of their hardware+software integration which makes profits from OS sales a bit less critical, plus Apple doesn't effectively have the large business segment that creates a "downsale" risk vulnerability. Thus, the consumer version is more free to "go further" feature-wise for these same business centric OS elements.
Yeah, I saw the '$500' and I was like...no, it doesn't cost $500. I was looking at MS Office prices, because I'm going to buy 2011 with my academic discount, and I'll only be paying $99 for it, definitely not $500. It's only about $200 at full price.
The Office suite from Microsoft has the same sort of dilemma: how to get business to pay full freight, while also trying to expand sales into the home/personal market without a 'bag of hurt' price tag.
The general solution has been the Home/Student package for $99 or thereabouts ... which works great for Microsoft's strategy, although it does cause a segment of consumers an issue, when one sets up a small/home business and you realize that technically, your license doesn't permit that use.
Thus, the small businessman is off to Amazon for a legit Office license ... and we find a tiny bit of good news: it isn't $500 afterall, but merely $450 per copy.
As such, the ******** $500 comment wasn't really ******** afterall: its cost depends upon the actual customer and their application (home or business) to determine how much the license is. For a small (probably struggling) home business, the recognition is very prompt: it's nearly the same exact product with two price tags, which can similarly invoke that GM "same car under the badge" frustration on the consumer's assessment of the product's value.
Probably many posters are too young to remember it, but years ago, there was a lawsuit against GM because they IIRC put a Chevy engine in a Cadillac. It may sound silly and trivial, but this was a serious "Branding" problem for them, since the product was marketed as nothing less than a Cadillac.
-hh
