One of the factors deterring many consumers from upgrading their PCs to Vista was the high price points for the new shiny operating system. The folks at Microsoft were finally let in on the secret, and decided to lower the price points of Vista substantially.

The new price points are staggered so as to encourage consumers to select the highest edition they can handle - don’t say we didn’t warn you that you might actually spend more money upgrading your machine to handle a higher edition of Vista than you’ll save on the software.

Reuters lists the following new prices for the different versions of Vista as follows: Vista Ultimate has dropped from $399 to $319, the upgrade to Ultimate will now only cost $219 instead of $259, and the upgrade to Home Premium has dropped from $159 to $129.

If you’re wondering what happened to Home Basic (though I doubt anyone would really be disappointed if it never came back from an Alps skiing expedition), it will be sold in full at upgrade version price; similarly, in emerging markets Home Premium will be sold in full at upgrade prices, but upgrade versions won’t be available in those markets because Microsoft believes most consumers will be purchasing their first full copies of Windows.

Microsoft is definitely trying to lure in all the customers who are scared by Vista’s price tag and those who are riding the fence on whether upgrading is really worth it at this point, what with the hardware requirements. We’ll see whether the new price points are effective enough soon.

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Entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 4:45 pm under Microsoft, Upgrading, Vista.  Print This Post

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