EightBlack.

This is my last day in the US before I head home.

And as long as I have been travelling, I can’t remember a day like yesterday (from Omaha to JFK, New York, 3 separate flights, flight duration 13 hours and no bags on arrival).

But that’s another story…

Vista launches today. There’s been plenty of press.

In this morning’s USA Today, both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are interviewed.

There’s almost this “discomfort”, even “wincing” coming across in both interviews. As if both Gates and Ballmer are saying to themselves “if this reporter mentions Google one more time in this freakin interview, I’m going to jump across the table and rip her arms off…”. Or something like that.

A lot is riding on Vista being successful.

Me, I think Microsoft should give it away. Before you laugh (or scoff at the suggestion), think about it.

Seattle needs Vista to work well. Not from a financial sense. But from an image sense. It’s the company’s biggest play in the last 5 years.

Ballmer is quoted in the article this morning as saying most people that upgrade to Vista will do so as a result of buying a new PC. So that’s that revenue stream sorted.

But there are going to be a lot of people - and more so the business community, who will go out and actually buy the upgrade (both the operating system and Office 2007).

According to Matt Krantz,

Windows and Office, a suite of productivity software, are the software maker’s most profitable product lines, accounting for about half its $12.5 billion in second-quarter revenue. But they are also among its oldest: Neither has been overhauled in years. If Microsoft is to preserve its high-tech golden geese, it must persuade the hundreds of millions of current Windows and Office users worldwide to switch, software analysts say.

I’m suggesting that for a limited time, and as a way of saying thank you to the world population who have let Microsoft dominate their desktops for so long, to actually give away the application. Let us choose and buy the version of Office we need. But give us Vista.

Microsoft need all the help they can get.

This would go a long way to help their stodgy image.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 1:53 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.