Microsoft tries tempting small firms with free Vista support
Microsoft has come up with a new technique to persuade businesses to upgrade to Vista: free support until the end of October.
Of course, there are several catches:
- The offer only applies to US firms with fewer than 50 employees and a maximum of 25 PCs.
- It’s telephone support only, from 10am-7pm Pacific time (so West Coasters had better hope nothing goes wrong when they turn on their PCs at the start of the day).
- You must upgrade before the end of September.
- And it only covers the Business and Ultimate editions of Vista, so the self-employed may be out of luck.
Telephone staff will apparently offer ‘deep support’ and provide ‘compatibility reassurance’. Sadly that probably won’t involve Barry White telling you everything is OK.
Rather amusingly, as a last resort staff will even talk you through downgrading to XP.
Microsoft has dubbed the scheme ‘Small Business Assurance’ and launched a website dedicated to what a spokesman called “bridging a perception gap in the market among non-users”.
Ironically Vista refuseniks will probably be the most assured by the website, which makes it clear there’ll be some form of support for XP for another six years.
The site also trots out some of the now familiar quotes: Vista is 60% less vulnerable to spyware than XP, Vista now supports 77,000 hardware devices, double the number at launch, and so on. There’s also a quoted survey where 62% of small business think Vista saves them time, though strangely there’s no mention of how the remainder split between ‘makes no difference’ and ‘have lost the will to live’.
The offer probably makes sense to Microsoft: it’s earning them publicity to get across their message that compatibility issues are somewhat overstated at this point. But it’s questionably how many small business bosses will be tempted by the deal and how many will conclude Vista must still have problems if free support is considered a valuable bonus.
Related Posts:
July 11th, 2008
Microsoft don’t have a clue how to conduct business, do they? They have grown fat on the back of a monopoly, and they have never had to learn some of the fundamental lessons:
1) If you are selling a product that has to compete, you will live or die by the quality of that product, and by how competitive it is at the price you are charging. No one is interested in free support for a dud product; what they want is a *good* product (the actual support requirements of which would be, by definition, minimal).
2) The customer is always right. If Microsoft releases rubbish such as Vista and then talks of a “perception gap in the market among non-users”, it makes no difference – Vista is still rubbish. Microsoft can bleat all they want that Vista is good, but that does not change the facts.
3) Companies that ignore such basic tenets as stated in 1) and 2) will be deservedly perceived as arrogant and out of touch, and they will lose market share as their customers vote with their feet.
Steve Ballmer and other senior executives at Microsoft are handsomely remunerated – could it really be the case that they are unable to grasp simple business principles?
August 23rd, 2008
I upgraded to Vista and Office 2007. When I tried to insert a table into Word the table cells turned blue and I could not type into them. I tried restalling Office–the same thing happend. Has anyone addressed this problem? If so, please tell me how to fix it.
October 14th, 2008
I would like to tell everyone out there in the internet just how poor Vista is. It really is very very disappointing. From crashing regularly to being incredibly slow (on a v fast computer) for simple everyday usage.
Dont buy it!
Enda