Windows 8 Times Five

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft is planning to raise the Windows 8 upgrade price almost five fold in about two weeks time. In my opinion, this is the wrong move – particularly when their steep-learning-curve OS has been met with only a luke-warm reception. Thoughts?

-Krishna

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  • Jake EskelReply
    January 21, 2013 at 8:08 am

    The less software costs, the more people will buy it. Apple lowered their upgrade price, and upgrading became the easiest thing for old users. None of this “I’d like to upgrade, but it doesn’t GIVE me anything”. Now it is “I’d like to upgrade, and SURE I have 30 bucks.” 99 cents? Now people pile on the purchases.

    Apple could no more raise the price of every app in the App Store 5 fold than Windows can afford to raise the price of their OS 5 fold. Now, remember when Snow Leopard was a 29 dollar “Special Price Upgrade”? That was supposed to expire. It never did. Look at the Lion price today. Apple realized that lower price was amazing with encouraging people to upgrade.

    I wish Microsoft luck. I think they may find it easy to live on XBox sales, and they may need to.

    • Gordon McAlpinReply
      January 21, 2013 at 2:17 pm

      Oh, still see people saying that the $20–30 upgrades for OSX don’t give them anything (feature-wise). Every time Apple updates it.

  • Jim HawkinsReply
    January 21, 2013 at 4:59 pm

    MS is being foolish in raising the price of Win 8…..They didn’t learn anything when folks stuck to Win XP for years and even after they quit supporting it….All they will do is push folks into staying with Win 7 for a long time.

    Not the best business decision….Then again this is the Company that produced Windows ME.

  • ArkanabarReply
    January 21, 2013 at 5:57 pm

    I hope we’ll see more people replacing Win7 with an assortment of relatively easy to install & maintain Linux-based OSes: Mint, K/X/Lubuntu, PCLOS, Mageia, openSUSE, and such. It will go much easier for them should they choose to just install over Win7, rather than try to make it work with Secure Boot under Win8.

  • qkaReply
    January 24, 2013 at 10:29 pm

    Windows 8 going up 5-fold? That’s too little. They should raise the price 10-fold. Or better yet, 20-fold!

  • Justin HamrickReply
    January 28, 2013 at 2:03 pm

    Windows 8 has been… interesting. The start menu is ideal for a touchscreen environment, but terrible for a mouse, and they removed out-of-the-box DVD playback as a lame cost-cutting measure, other than that it’s largely the same as Win 7.

Tell me what you think!

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