Windows 7 Family Pack: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

By  |  Friday, July 31, 2009 at 11:12 am

Family PackMicrosoft has finished up announcing pricing details for Windows 7 by disclosing the cost for the three-user Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack and for Windows Anytime Upgrades. (The latter option lets you the unlock features from higher-end versions of Windows.)

The Family Pack will go for $149.99, or $50 per user– $10 more per user than Apple’s five-user Leopard Family Pack, but an attractive deal considering that three stand-alone copies of 7 Home Premium list for $359.97. But the odd thing is, the Family Pack isn’t so much a new version of Windows as a limited-time sale. The Microsoft blog post says it’s be available “until supplies last.” (I think they mean “while supplies last” or (“until supplies run out,”) but you get the idea.)

Microsoft’s entitled to charge whatever it wants for Windows, but it’s a shame that it’s not making the extremely appealing idea of buying Windows in bulk at a discount into a permanent option for its customers. If Apple is able to do it, why not Microsoft? And the notion of doing it with no well-defined deadline smacks of infomercial hype. (If supplies run out, I suspect Microsoft could crank out some more copies if it chose.) We don’t know whether supplies will run out halfway through October 22nd, Windows 7’s launch date, or whether copies will still be plentiful on October 22nd, 2010.

Meanwhile, pricing for Windows 7 Anytime Upgrades involves a complicated matrix of original Windows 7 versions and upgrade versions. It makes my head hurt just to think about it, but ZDNet’s Ed Bott has done the math and says that Microsoft will gouge people who move from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. Ultimate has very few features that aren’t in Professional, and Microsoft has said that only a “small set” of customers will want it. So maybe it’s just discouraging people from performing an unnecessary upgrade by making the pricing unattractive…

 
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4 Comments For This Post

  1. drew Says:
    July 31st, 2009 at 12:29 pm

    Since my Vista machine was working perfectly, I decided to create some grief for myself by installing Windows 7 RC. It is very nice, but nothing that blows me away. I keep going back to my little netbook with UNR, and I finding it harder to justify spending the money on upgrading to Windows 7 (and beyond), when Ubuntu does so much of what I need (and want) to do. I am sure there will be all kinds of deals, but it just does not seem that compelling anymore. I may just run this RC version down until March 2010, when it expires, and I may go back to Linux.

    I thought I find myself frustrated with Linux, but it has not happened yet. Time will tell.

  2. Ron Says:
    August 1st, 2009 at 7:43 am

    Microsoft wants to increase possible impulse purchases by putting an “until supplies last” moniker on the advertising for it.

    Besides not be grammatically correct, it’s completely false… In the days of this speedy disk duplication industry, they can make disks as required and as ordered.

    Microsoft probably doesn’t even order a single disk to be manufactured until they get a certain volume of sales. How could they “run out” of inventory, when it is created on an as-needed basis?

    Marketing hype.

  3. Backlin Says:
    August 2nd, 2009 at 7:15 pm

    I like that “until supplies last”. That makes this seem like an experimental thing.

  4. Ian Maon Says:
    August 13th, 2009 at 10:43 pm

    I really like this “OS”Windows Seven. Well done!! to the very intelligent brain who create this. Can you send me a site via email so that i can download this “OS” for free.

    Thanks ….

2 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. Microsoft Should Continue Windows 7 Family Pack Licensing | Technologizer Says:
    December 4th, 2009 at 5:20 pm

    […] Microsoft has been offering family packs of Windows 7 to customers for a discounted price–while supplies last. It would behoove it to make the family packs a permanent […]

  2. Windows 7 Family Pack: It’s Baaaaaaack! And That’s Annoying « gamestopmafia.com Says:
    September 2nd, 2010 at 6:07 pm

    […] first anniversary of Windows 7′s release by bringing back the Windows 7 Family Pack which it briefly offered when the OS shipped. The Family Pack offers three Windows 7 Home Premium upgrades for $149.99, and […]