Vista prices in EU

[ErosOlmi]

Well, I should have been out of math for some time or someone at Microsoft think at EU as the cow to be "milken" or Microsoft wants a revenge for EU court cases but Vista prices here in EU are much much higher than in the US. If you also consider exchange rate (1.20 or so) ... ???

In Italy:
Vista Home Basic: 299.99 Euro (Euro, not USD !!!!)
Vista Home Premium: 359.99 Euro
Vista Business: 499.99 Euro
Vista Ultimate: 599.99 Euro (almost the price of many not hightech laptops)

It will take big time before I will move to Vista.
WinXP + ZoneAlarm = Vista +++

I bought 3 XBox to make a present to my brothers as soon as XBox was on the market (so highest price). None of the three passed the first 14 month of life and to repair them the cost was much higher than a new XBox (1 HD crash and 2 power supply unit broken).
And I still have original Playstation 10 years old working perfectly.

Are they kidding us?

[RobertoBianchi]

Hmm,

I'm waiting for mature stage of Vista and ... Playstation3 ;D

Ciao,
Roberto

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi,

maybe the Euro countries are in slight disadvantage.
We don't have this currency here yet, so we will get Vista at prize equivalent of dollars :)

Still nothing cheap, especialy when I have read you can reinstall just twice and in most cases buy new megaPC :(

Also it seems almost nobody has really powerful drivers for Vista, this is very confusing.

Although I understand it is whole new driver model introduced here, I don't like situation when ATi has still no OpenGL support in drivers. On other side, although nVidia released OpenGL header files for GeForce 8800, I am also not sure if they support it in driver now. And it is even more psychedelic to read reports from various people where everybody says something different :) Hope after year or two the situation will be much happier and cleaner.

I am very surprised by the XBOX trouble, 14 months is not too much :o

I have read some game companies were very disappointed by the way PS3 will be programmed, do you have any detailed info on that ? Maybe it just seems "hard" in comparsion with XNA which is presented as easy tool...


Bye,
Petr

[kryton9]

My friends and I are all talking about the pricing in dollars as being too high, let alone the Euro pricing you showed, Wow.

Unless I buy a new system and Vista come on it, there is no way I am paying that much for an OS.

XP forever or Ubuntu Linux when it is the way they want it to be. That is as easy to install and use as Windows for home users.

I have a feeling we will see the Vista prices drop like a rock. I think they figure Businesses will buy it first so they jacked the price up on all products so the business pricing didn't seem too high compared to the rest of the line. Most people in the US get the OS when they buy a computer, sort of a Microsoft strong arm tactic that a MS OS be on any computer sold type of deal by major makers. So vista will appear at home computers as users buy new computers then they will want it at work to be compatible etc.

I don't think Vista will be around in quantity on the scene in terms of market penetration for 2 years with this approach. Gives Ubuntu and other Linux distros time to kill Vista. Of course there is the MAC OS, which runs on intel chips now. If Apple ever sold that as an OS anyone could buy and use, wow that would be something!!