Matt Hartley wrote a column for OS Weekly that takes Dell to task for “hiding” pricing and system capabilities for Windows Vista. He makes some good points, but in general I think he’s blaming the wrong company (and I suspect his “hide-and-seek” is a libel-avoiding euphemism for “bait-and-switch”).
Yes, the systems in question are probably underpowered as presented to run Vista. But is that Dell’s fault, or Microsoft’s fault for producing a resource-sucking operating system? Windows XP is a venerable old operating system these days, and any system on the market can run it without breaking a sweat. Prices have dropped dramatically, and we even saw laptops under $500 at Christmas time.
But now these same systems would be clunkers running Vista, especially with the Aero interface enabled. If Dell (or any vendor) were to put systems with ample enough resources to run Vista and Aero on their front pages, they’d look expensive. He says confusion will drive Dell surfers to Gateway, but if they did it the way he wants, pricing would drive them to Gateway.
It’s a no-win situation for all the vendors.
I think he also makes a mistake in assuming everyone wants to run Aero. The geeks, maybe, but not the average user. As the only technician in a school district, I get teachers, parents and students alike all asking me what they need to buy in a system, especially at this time of year when seniors are finalizing their college plans. The first thing I ask is “What do you want to do with it?”
90% of them have the same answer: “Surf the Internet and check email.” They don’t need a jumped-up interface to do that, and they could probably care less if it was there or not. They don’t know what Aero is, much less the difference between Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium. Hell, I’d even have to look it up if they asked me.
It used to be if they told me they want to do photos, maybe a little bit of music and video, or they want to do gaming, I would just say “get yourself a gig of RAM, avoid onboard video, and get Pentium over Celeron.” Now they have to beef up even higher to do that and run Vista at more than a snail’s pace, and the bill goes up even higher.
And their jaws plummet to the floor.
People don’t know what the system does, they just want to check their email and surf the Internet. That’s why sub-$500 systems like eMachines fly out the door. Vista is going to make keeping commodity equipment on the shelves or in the catalogs very difficult for vendors and retailers, and I think it’s only going to drive more people to Mac or Linux.
Which I imagine is exactly the reason Dell is entertaining the idea of OS-less or Linux-preinstalled systems.
on Feb 22nd, 2007 at 9:41 pm
The thing you have to realize is that the cheapo machines are all coming with Vista Home Basic which doesn’t even use Aero. Also, 1 GB is more than enough to run Premium. The main limiter is video card rather than RAM.
Dell is just trying to price low and get people to upgrade to pay more. Aero is just a fancier interface, and really is not all that needed. They do get rid of Media Center in the basic version, so that kinda sucks. The Media Center functionality is really cool, but a low end machine probably wouldn’t cut it for that anyway.
So MS really isn’t that evil. I just helped my mother-in-law buy a Vista Premium laptop with 2GB of RAM that was really reasonably priced. The thing screams, and looks good doing it.
People can bitch about a lot of things in Vista, but many reports say that it runs near the same speed as the same spec’d machine running XP. I ran it on a ThinkPad with one GB of RAM while it was in beta, and it ran great.
And trust me, this isn’r driving anyone to Mac or Linux. For comparable hardware, Macs are generally more expensive than PC’s. GEEKS are flocking to the Mac, mainly for the dual-boot capability. But your average joe schmoe home user isn’t going to be driven away by Vista. They will find something in their price range and go with it.
on Feb 22nd, 2007 at 10:18 pm
If Home Basic doesn’t have all that extra crap, then cool. The OSWeekly column certainly didn’t present it that way.
But I maintain most of these sites have to treat it like ADV product in a retail store: price it low to get ‘em in the door. It also depends what we’re calling “reasonably priced.” For certain features, you and I can say “yeah, that’s a good deal,” but the average Joe Home User is going to see $500 vs. $1500 and wonder what the hell he’s paying for.
Maybe the difference in perspectives is I’ve worked for two schools and an ISP and I have a lot more contact with non-technical people than technical. Judging by what Maximum PC typically has to say, a $350 eMachines bundle is not even an option, but it’s more than enough for just about anyone in my school district (especially with our low-income rate pushing 20%).
As I said in an earlier post, my laptop is a 700MHz PIII with 384MB of RAM. Linux runs like a champ on it. Most people would think it’s junk because they just don’t any know better, because now some developers (I’ll lump KDE and GNOME in with Vista) tell us those specs just aren’t gonna cut it.
The retailers and vendors have to deal with what’s handed to them.