With Microsoft Corp. likely reeling after the European Commission this week enforced a staggering fine of 1.4bn USD for anti-competitive practices, the American software giant is pushing on with plans to persuade stubborn Windows XP users to make the jump to Windows Vista.
Microsoft looks to tempt XP users towards Windows Vista with solid price drops. Credit: Microsoft.
Going straight for the consumer jugular, Redmond-based Microsoft revealed yesterday that it plans to reduce the prices connected to the Windows Vista operating system, which was launched in January of this year but has met with resistance.
This resistance has come predominantly from business users not willing to swap the grounded stability of XP ahead of the arrival of the fixes and refinements due to be introduced via Vista’s Service Packet 1 (SP1) upgrade.
According to Microsoft’s retail blueprint for 2008, the price of Windows Vista will be lowered in 70 countries later in the year, which will coincide with the rollout of Vista SP1 and make the operating system considerably more attractive to prospective consumers.
North American prices of Windows Vista will see the upper-tier Ultimate edition fall from $399 down to a more accessible $319 for the full retail version, while the online Ultimate upgrade from XP or other iterations of Vista will shift from $259 to $219.
The price of Windows Vista Home Premium, the most widely used edition of the operating system, will also fall from $239 to a thoroughly tempting $129.
“We anticipate these changed will provide greater opportunities... to sell more stand-alone copies of Windows,” said Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Brooks in a Reuters report.
Since Vista’s January 31 arrival, Microsoft has sold more than 100 million licenses of its latest OS. That being said, full retail and online sales of Vista account for less than 10 percent of all Windows platforms currently installed on more than 90 percent of the world’s computer systems.
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