Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Awesome! No more WGA/Kill Switch!

From ZDNet's Ed Bott: The WGA kill switch will be gone in Vista SP1.

My opinion as a Windows employee? Good riddance.

WGA is DRM for operating systems. It Does Not Work. People will copy Windows Vista, no matter what we do.

On the other hand, it does resoundingly suck that shady system resellers are selling cracked versions of Vista. WGA did help to stamp that out... a bit.

The long term solution? Don't sell Windows for so bloody much. I think Windows is worth more than $0 - it does contain a lot of new technology, after all.

I don't think the Ultimate version is worth $200, though.

Maybe... $100? How much would you pay?

12 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

$139 just like leopard.

Unknown said...

Yeah, but Leopard is an upgrade. I'd pay 150.

Terry said...

Full version: 150
Upgrade: 120

I like your company price a lot more though. :)

DK said...

How about $90?

Dez said...

I think that some trust would go a long way for Microsoft. People now have multiple computers. I would say that $150 for Ultimate is good and $100 for Home Premium or Bussiness and $60 for Basic.

Of course maybe Basic shouldnt even exist.

Having said that with the current scheme, I would allow 2 installs for each Ultimate license... people can justify a higher tag with more installs.

This is why the Office Student version sells well.

$150/3 = $50 an install bargain.

all 3 computers in the house updated at a reasonable price.

nonarKitten said...

Windows should be split into its functional components and dealt with separatly (though sold as packages).

In keeping ahead of the Open Source movement Windows "Core" would be free to download, include IE and Mail, DirectX and of course the Windows Kernal. It can run everything out there in third party land, but doesn't come with anything. Everything else (Windows Media Center, Tablet, Professional/Corporate, Developer) would be additional.

Unknown said...

I'd say... the RTM... without updates... 65$. Fair.

Not worth much more, though it is quite a nifty OS. I mean, sure people could say you could do everything Vista does in some Linux Distro but that isn't the most consumer friendly OS in the world (I've tried...) and I'm by no means a hardcore developer. Vista is just easy, though buggy as it is. And, as an article on PC world aptly states, there's really only one vista choice: Ultimate.

Unknown said...

How about.....zero.

I use Ubuntu 7.10 + compiz fusion and didn't spend a nickel to do so.

You asked. ;)

Anthony Lawrence said...

I'd only pay $50, because I only run it under Parallels. Actually, I'd like to buy another copy (again to run under virtualization).. but I'm not going to spend what y'all want for it.

Unknown said...

Two ideas:

(1) One price for each edition, and people can pick the business stuff or the fun home/gaming stuff, or the whole thing if they want. Or just one edition for no more than $150.

(2) Make Windows free, and so feature rich, stable and reliable that people _want_ to pay for it. I would fall into this category. I have no problem paying for software, but I have to know first that its worth my hard-earned cash and won't waste my time.

Tom Kopacz said...

I'd pay $0. Same price I paid for Ubuntu, which is a more-efficient, more feature-rich and less-bloated product.