Windows 7 tops Amazon charts
Four days after going on sale, the cut-price ‘pre-order’ of the Windows 7 upgrades is proving a success through at least one retailer. The Home Premium and Professional upgrades are firmly atop the Amazon software chart.
At the time of writing, Home Premium was in the number one slot, immediately followed by Professional. It’s worth remembering that Amazon charts are heavily influenced by recent purchases, meaning products can often rank highly simply by a spike in sales from a promotion.
The charts can also be somewhat quirky. To give an example, Home Premium is also number one in the chart for all computer products (that is, hardware and software), while Professional is nowhere to be seen.
The way Amazon markets the various editions may suggest few consumers will feel the need to go beyond Home Premium. A chart produced by the site lists the added benefits of Professional as simply an XP compatibility mode, easier connections to office networks and automatic backup to a network. Those extras, while useful for some, may struggle even to attract the interest of small businesses. (A chart with identical wording appears on Best Buy’s site, suggesting it may be Microsoft’s own publicity material.)
The same chart simply plugs the Ultimate Edition as adding BitLocker encryption and the ability to switch languages. There’s no clear direct comparison of Windows 7 to Vista, making it difficult to see which features are truly new. That said, part of the reason for this may be the commercial dilemma of promoting Windows 7 without being too explicit about saying it fixes some of Vista’s problems.
Several of the sites running the promotion are listing yet another upgrade offer. In this one anyone buying either a standalone copy of Vista, or upgrading to Vista, can then upgrade to the relevant edition of Windows 7 for $9.99 upon release, though this price may vary depending on the retailer.
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