Don't pay for Windows 98! www5.zdnet.com
Hey, that wasn't me that said that. Old sourpuss John Dvorak weighs in on the "sucks less" side of the upcoming duality of man dilemma.
At what point does providing a bug fix become the obligation of a software company? That's the question we have to ask with Windows 98, which Microsoft says fixes thousands of bugs. I don't see any compelling reason to buy Windows 98 except for the bug fixes and the USB support. But I can support USB with a patch for Windows 95, so why isn't the Windows 98 upgrade free?
Aside from which, from Bill's excellent Comdex adventure, we're not sure if USB support will really work anyway. Anyway, Dvorak has obviously never read a shrink wrap license. You got a readable CD? You got what you paid for.
In a perfect world, a company like Microsoft would develop a product like Windows 95 and strive to make it bug-free for free! After all, the users who bought Windows 95 are supporting the company and tend to be dedicated users of other Microsoft products. What thanks do they get when the massive bug fix finally arrives? No thanks, and give me a hundred bucks. Oh, and expect to pay again and again--and again--for the same thing.
I think Microsoft is going to discover that most users will stick with Windows 95 and hope they will be allowed to upgrade to the release after Windows 98 without being penalized for not playing the upgrade game the way Microsoft dictates it.
Well, what do you want, free IE or free bug fixes? Don't answer that, it's the wrong question. Which is more critical to Microsoft's business plan?
On the pricing issue, I will note that the ~$100 upgrade from Win3x to Win95, for basically a whole new system, is quite different than ~$100 from Win95 to Win98, which is a few new features and a bunch of bug fixes. Does $100 take you from Win3x to Win98 directly? Then there's the other issue of OEM pricing, which is in a different world where the ~$40 price comes with strings attached, if not horse heads. "The OEMs have to ship the machines the way we build them".
In Microsoft's defense, I will say that SP3 for NT4 seemed to be about 50% of the size of the original distribution, so some fixes are "free". It's just that all that "unearned revenue" from Win95 was allocated to something else.
Cheers, Dan. |
