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Story: Microsoft cuts Vista price to drive upgrades

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More marketing, Lower Prices - How About A Better Product?

Microsoft says that Vista is "doing great", "exceeding expectations", or whatever the latest overblown hype is. But then they say they need to dump a few hundred million dollars more into "Marketing" Vista, to make sure people really "get the message". Now they say they need to drop the price, to "encourage people to upgrade". But don't forget, Vista is "exceeding expectations". When are they going to realize that what they need to do to make Vista succeed, and really be accepted, is very simple - it needs to work, reliably, at least as well as XP and preferably better. Oh, and it needs to support a lot more peripherals, so that people don't have to upgrade to Vista AND buy a new printer, a new scanner, a new network card, whatever...

Selling 100 million copies to a "captive market" (OEMs), is more like "force feeding" than market success. The fact that those OEMs started to push back so hard, and demand that Microsoft continue to allow them to sell new systems with XP, is the real measure of the "success" (or lack thereof) of Vista.

Meanwhile, my Vista disk is laying on my desk, corrupted by the latest episode of "Vista Madness", and I really don't have the desire or motivation to reload it from scratch. Hyping it won't help. Lowering the price won't help.

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