I agree with your price point.

However you got your priorities all messed up with concerns to the most important component.

By FAR the most important component in your system is your PSU!!!!! without a good quality PSU that also provides a large enough wattage/AMP output, AMPs being the most important to look at, though you cannot have the proper amp output without a proper wattage. without this you will (due to lack of power) lose/fry your VGA card (usually the first to go) then possibly your cpu and/or mainboard if you don't realize what is happening soon enough. poor quality PSU = lose your system harware = your OS is worthless.

It had better one hell of an improvement. XP's defrag is COMPLETELY WORTHLESS. I doubt I will EVER use a M$ defrag again. Your better off with O&O.

as for the price point and upgrade topic....

IMO price should be under $100 for upgrade and no more than $200 for full blown version (such as ultimate) any other limited versions should be 100-200 depending on features.

regardless of price point for full version, so long as upgrades are available at a decent price that will be the route I go. I have Vista so can just upgrade.

on a side note hopefully they have not fixed the upgrade loop hole in 7 that past upgrades have had....ie. the ability to preform a clean install with an upgrade disk. I would prefer to do a clean install vs an upgrade just as an opportunity to clean the system up a bit. 

I did the same with Vista. The way I see it, M$ knew full well that upgrades had the ability to perform a clean install and chose not to solve the problem. I am still paying for the product so I'm good with that. I legally own the disk, if the company who produces it wants to leave a loop hole thats their problem. If M$ was worried about it they would solve it. Instead they just figure that a vast majority of the population will not know about the ability to clean install a system with an upgrade copy.

Nobody likes that directors and owners of large companies often pay themselves far more than their contributions are actually worth but charging the company itself more won't do anything to reduce their salaries. Any significant increase in costs is much more likely to result in less jobs within the company or unreasonable demands being placed on employees to make up the slack.

If you want them to pay a higher due you'd have to charge those people themselves more, not the company. Which is unfortunately next to impossible to do.

Alright

My problem with this unfortunately-durable dev fad is not sonmuch with the efforts to make 'intuitive' designs, although I believe strongly that an 'intuitive' interface is an eye-of-the-beholder thing and not some 'truth' that you can find with rigorous research. What really vexes me is the fact that Microsoft consistently makes major design choices that destroy the value that workers like me establish in ourselves by becoming skilled users.

When you radically redesign software that millions of workers are using with relative efficiency, you are in essence throwing those workers needlessly into retraining that does nothing to improve their value in the labor market. It just helps them put off the day when their IT-obssessed managers can feel confident replacing them with even newer gear and a totally inexperienced (cheap) new hire.

So, I guess that's another reason I don't think a boutique price for my OS is reasonable. If the 'improvements' were designed to both help new folks get going quickly *and* let experienced folks keep working quickly, I might think that the OS cost should be a big chunk of the total for a new box. But it ain't so yet.

p.s. Two nice things I have to say about Win 7 so far: it hopefully will have decent text-zoom at last, and the base system will no longer be cluttered with things like Outlook Express or MSN Messenger (whatever its name is these days).

It should be free in a Vista update, like SP1- so you can try it out, don't like it, uninstall it; easier than when you upgraded from XP to Vista. After all the crap I've had to experience with Vista...it literally ate up XP....Vista users deserve it.

Those who have XP or other, that want to get it, should pay the usual... 120 - 160 or so bucks for Vista and then after install, be upgraded soon after, like usual, with all the updates and Win7...so basically Micro isn't losing -that- much.

it's their fault if they lose money with Win7 ..they brought out Vista way too early. And I'm sure they know this...

Agreed - but I still think it should be the default if it's being installed on a system that is 64 bit capable.

Frankly, I don't bother with defragging in Vista/7 except to set the schedule.

Instead, I buy as much memory as possible and minimize disk use. I still have it defrag, but I reduce the neeed to worry about it.

In all honesty, I think they should just merge the two into one product that allows both upgrading and clean installs. Forget having two products at two prices.

. . . and you are right, in all honesty it's almost always far better to do a clean install than an upgrade. Usually by the time a new OS comes out it's time to clean up the computer anyways.

Yes and no. While it is true that individual tastes can vary, it is possible to collect statistics on the habits of most users, and more often than not there are very clear trends.

In addition, there are some common principles you can find in UI design. My engineering book has a chapter in UI design with the folowing three "golden rules":

1. Place the user in control.
2. Reduce the user's memory load.
3. Make the interface consistent.

I seriously doubt those principles can be argued - although sometimes the details can.

There's an article by Joel Spolsky about UI design that I recommend reading.

I like this quote of his:

This pretty much sums up what I see in a lot of places where the UI seems wrong to regular people, but power users claim it's right. The power users love having an extreme amount of customization, but regular users just want to focus on the primary task. Sometimes, the customization gets in the way of getting stuff done.

It all really boils down to this: Know your audience.

The one biggest, fatal mistake of poor UIs is that the developers swear that their way is right (and can even explain it), but it conflicts with how it's really used by the users.

MicheleJane posted while I was writing up my response . . .

No.

Sorry if you had a lot of troubles with Vista, but that doesn't mean you should get their next OS for free.

Wait just 20 years MS will give Win7 for free with Vista and XP as bonus packs....

As far as free OS is concerned I think MS should release Win 98 or 2000 as free now....

Now why would MS do that?  Neither OS is supported by patches or updates anymore, to make way for current OS support, and rereleasing them would surely imply to some that MS is obligated to provide support.

Ford aren't giving away obsolete Model T's as bonus packs to current models, and I don't see MS giving away 98 and/or 2000, either.

OK. First, you caught me stealth-quibbilng over terms. It is the *word* "intuitive" that I find so misplaced in much public dev talk, where the general implied assumption is that intuition is a one-size-fits-all thing. More precise terms like discoverability and usability make much more sense to me if you want to start talking about actual stats.

"Know your audience" hits home with me solidly--I have to apply that in my work also. Sometimes it really can make a job easier, e.g. "Revise or cut the technical talk here so that our sales and marketing staff can follow it." But sometimes the audience is so potentially large and/or complex that getting to know them well could take near-unlimited time. I think the latter is a basic challenge for products like Windows, and their necessary scope limits seem to be pushing us 'power users' out of the mix. (We even had an NTFS user group named for us briefly--what happened?)

More to the point of my earlier threadjacking talk, I don't see why a dev team as resource-rich as Windows or Office can't do a better job of enabling 'improved' UIs to step aside whenever an experienced user would prefer a 'classic' set of controls. It strikes me as a sign of their own doubt about the choices involved in radical redesigns like the stone-cold, authoritarian ribbon. If they were truly confident that the change was for the better, they should not have hesitated to let people actively compare the old and the new within a single application or OS.

Imho free for personal use would be appropriate, and then add some cost for support options. A higher pricetag for commercial use is not uncommon, starting at $100/license for the basic version up to whatever reasonable a volume license could be worth...

Looking at a more "realistic" pricing, I'd say $25 for upgrade from vista (let's face it, unless they add some really dazzling extras, it's nothing more than just a big service pack...) and $100 upgrade from XP... That's not likely to happen either though...

I think we'll see the same pricing as we got now, from microsofts point of view "if it works don't fix it" is not strange. They are probably more interested in milking as much cash as possible from everyone before they have to either jump onto the "free-wagon" or fade away as "once-a-dominant-OS".

What price point will they set? That's an easy one. As much as the market will bear.

well i dont agree >.>   ive got xp  for the sole reason that i knew vista sucked,   just becuase i took time in looking up some information b4 purchase doesnt mean i should pay more...

rly i do think it should be sold cheap... just to repay people for making such a miserable piece of software...  and for the sake of my wallet....

im glad theyre not yet throwing away 32-bit,  there's plenty of programs that i still use,  stuff wich is jsut not replaceable   not until something just like it is released now i just i'll just run a multi-boot using 64-bit and 32-bit  both the same only able to run 32 and 64 -bit seperatly...  that's really gonna be helpfull

it wouldnt be very fair either,  becuase sotfware wich runs on 32-bit is still being released... or has been released not that long ago,   some game's will just not run on 64-bit, so wont be played anymore, even tough it's still fun playing

Becuase:

• It was a big change, and maintaining two sets of controls likely would have been a lot of work.
• Their statictics say that relatively few people actually performed a lot of customization.
• Frankly, it's a no-win situation. If Microsoft keeps it, people will complain about bloat and their reluctance to leave the past behind them.
• Even Microsoft doesn't have infinite resources - and it appears that's not one area where they wanted to use recources for.
• If you really hate the ribbon so much, there are third party developers that offer addons that simulate the classic look.

Sometimes we power users and developers tend to forget that we are often not the largest target market.

I dunno about the emotion-loaded "miserable piece of software" argument, but I do think they should reconsider their pricing.

Backwards compatibility with 32 bit software is superb in both Vista and Windows 7. I have had very little trouble running 32 bit software on my OS.

Can you name those games?

The only games I can think of are DOS and Windows 3 games which are 16 bit (or using a 32 bit extender), not pure 32 bit. In those cases, they can usually be run in an emulator anyways (many DOS games won't even run in XP anymore).

All of the 32 bit games I have tried so far work perfectly in Vista, and I expect them to continue working in Windows 7.

hopefully something i can afford......if that fails ill wait a few months and try to score a decent priced unopened version on ebay.