I was just reading an article over at
PC World about people who actually paid $399 or more for Vista Ultimate at retail. Having actually been dumb enough to pay this much, their stupidity now compels them to admit to the act by complaining.
Why are these idiots perturbed? MS promised periodic upates and freebees as enticement to buy the top of the line edition of Vista, but so far substantive add-ons have not materialized. MS is never one to walk away from a quick dishonest buck.
This got me thinking about the kind of person that trusts MS enough to pay in advance for features. Is trusting the starlet of multiple anti-trust lawsuits on pretty much every continent with a civilization ever a good idea? It is when you are an idiot, I guess.
You might ask; what features are worth such a hefty sum? What extensions to Vista - universally decried for being a step backwards from XP – could possibly be worth paying for?* To date there have been only a handful of underwhelming downloads - we are talking screensavers and casual games.
Screenshot taken from Asus VX3 review sample - no hipocracy here
I pondered the value proposition of an OS. Even one packed with as many trivial unfinished trinkets as vanilla Vista is pretty useless at the end of the day without some good apps. What the hell did people expect to be doing in the OS that could compel them to pay $399?
For comparison’s sake, Apple’s infinitely superior OS X 10.5 Leopard is just $125. A child can hack it to run on generic WinTel. You could almost buy a basic PC and Leopard for just the cost of Vista.
Alternatively, a store bought PC can be had at Best buy for about $400. This will come with Vista Home Premium that while lacking the superlative suffix it is exactly the OS delivered to date to folks who bought Vista Ultimate. Perhaps Vista Ulimate’s shiny black box caught the idiot’s eye, but I would rather have a nice case, dual core CPU with motherboard, 3 GB RAM, 320 GB HDD, DVD-RW, keyboard and mouse included free with my OS.
Hopefully MS does the right thing by giving Vista retail customers a free copy of Windows 7.
* Yes, it was universally decried because the opinions expressed by MS’s legion of paid minions/shills does not count. Not here anyway.
