Philly0381

Join Date 11/2004

+844

Sunday Newspaper Ads

Checking out computer sales.

We all do it, whether we are in the market to upgrade or buy a new system or not. No one really cares about the news (well maybe the sports section) in the paper, we fight to look at the advertising inserts.

As I was doing the Sunday ritual, I noticed that I wasn't finding systems with Vista Ultimate loaded. Mostly the systems were loaded with Vista Home Preimum, a few with Vista Home Basic, even one with Vista Business. I knew this couldn't be right, so I went back through and did find three laptops (no desktops) with Ultimate loaded. Even more surprising, none of the stores were advertising that they had OS's for sale. Now I didn't go to their web sites to check. My thinking was if they were paying good money to advertise, why, if they had the items in the store wouldn't they be shown. I'm sure that if I went to the stores I would probably see Ultimate loaded on machines, or would I.

The stores, Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot, Comp USA, Circuit City and Best Buy.

So I began wondering if this was a reflection of what people were buying, the makers of the computers had already sold all their Ultimate systems or MS was somehow involved because Ultimate doesn't deliver enough Ultimate experience?

So the question, is this what you are seeing where you live, and what are you thoughts?

Hey Stardock, what's you thoughts?

Locked Post

Advanced Search

Watch this post

Do not email me updates for this post Email me updates for this post

Successfully updated karma reason!

Philly0381

Join Date 11/2004

+844

Well I thought this was a good subject, guess not.

Successfully updated karma reason!

The kicker on Ultimate, in my opinion? Price points. It's a great O/s; when I get a Vista machine at home, I won't have anything less. But my guess is that big box manufacturers are counting on Ultimate sales to be more likly direct sales than POS sales.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Philly0381

Join Date 11/2004

+844

Thanks for stopping by Gideon, appreciate your response. Guess not to many people interested. Sorry. Everyone have a great day.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Zoomba

Join Date 11/2002

+114

The problem is that Vista isn't a clear enough value proposition for the sort of customer that shops for their PC at a local electronics store. These are the people who want to send email, surf the web and download pictures from a digital camera. For the last 6 years they've been using XP, and it does everything they need with minimal fuss. It's what they know. It's what they're comfortable with.

Vista changes just enough to confuse even the tech-savvy user, and in some cases adds features that get in the way of regular use (UAC).

So it changes behavior, and in some cases blocks the user. And it costs more. Even if it's technologically superior to XP, Vista just isn't worth it yet to the regular user.

And if you're a gamer, forget Vista for now. Bad 3D card driver support, no hardware 3D audio period, and DirectX 10 hardly works in the games that "support" it.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Philly0381

Join Date 11/2004

+844

Thanks for responding Zoomba.

I was really going after why there weren't more systems with Ultimate loaded on them, and why weren't the local stores advertising that they had Vista OS's for sale and what impact there was if any on Stardock if people weren't buying Vista Ultimate.

Successfully updated karma reason!

starkers

Join Date 05/2004

+1153

Dunno about anywhere else, but in my neck of the woods here in Oz, I'm not seeing any Vista Oses advertised at all, just pre-loaded Home Basic & Home Premium on under powered PC's that are supposedly Vista ready but aren't.

Yep, it sounds crazy, but pre-built Dell, HP Compaq, Acer and other big brand PC's are often retailing with just 512mb of RAM (1gb being the minimum) and on-board GPU's that do not fully support Aero. It's no wonder so many people reckon Vista is crap...the machines they've bought with it pre-installed just aren't up to the task.

Furthermore, most stores do not stock Vista Ultimate or Business OSes, just Home Basic and Premium, and sometimes not even those....if you want one they have to order it in, and that can take up to...well who knows. My local PC store owner told me that it's not unusual for him to have 6 to 8 paid for machines at a time just waiting on the suppliers to deliver Vista, sometimes for weeks....and he IS one guy who would stock the various Vista editions if he could, but unfortunately the suppliers don't or won't keep up with the demand.

I know that if I were Microsoft, I'd be spewing at the way some suppliers/retailers are handling the sale (or should I say non-sale) of Vista in the standalone format, and furious at the mismanagement of pre-built machines/sales.

Successfully updated karma reason!