Most households in America are now starting to see more than one computer in them. Today my kids share a single PC, and as they get older I am sure each will have to have their own. My wife and I each have laptops. Not to mention the desktop machine I use for show production. A road trip earlier in the year caused me to have an extra laptop that the wife uses, but before she went house mobile she had her own desktop machine.
This makes for a grand total 5 computers in my household all running Windows XP, of those machines 4 of them will be able to upgrade to Windows Vista and all five to Office 2007. When I start putting the calculator to this I realize that probably I can only afford to upgrade two of them with the respective versions I will want to run.
Here is where I get into the crux of the issue. I am a loyal Microsoft user and have a number of computers in my household that I will want to upgrade and because consumers are not afforded volume discounts I will be unable to upgrade them all.
Granted Microsoft usually deals with companies that buy bulk license but how come a consumer who needs to upgrade lets say more than 3 computers cannot be cut a break on the software cost. This reduces the chances that a consumer will try and apply a hack to save some money.
How about it should loyal customers be given discounts on volume purchases?
For Vista Microsoft is actually selling additional licenses for around 50 dollars. Contact Microsoft for additional product serial numbers.
I think you are right but unless it is a huge discount I dont see most people affording it anyways, but now that you mention your kids, I think Microsoft should release a kids version of Windows, cheaper and more limited, Kids should be able to research and do homework maybe some games but they dont need multimedia.
But I dont think MS really cares about their private customers, I worked retail once and the MS representative that came out to fill our shelves was always acting like he was annoyed, he wouldn’t even give us extra empty boxes for display purpose.