If this report is true from Mary Jo Foley of at ZDNet, it’s pretty good news! No official announcement has been made, but it is said that Microsoft will offer a “family pack” discount for people purchasing multiple copies of their new operating system, Windows Vista. It’s supposed to be announced within the next few days, and hopefully prices will also follow.
As it stands, the Family Pack promotion would require that a customer would first have to purchase a copy of Vista Ultimate for $399. Then, additional copies would be offered at a discounted rate, and it’s been rumored that those prices would range from $49.99 to $99.95… quite the discount from the original price. This would be easy for them to do because multiple versions of Vista will already be on a single DVD. This is part of the Windows Anytime Upgrade Marketing Plan (making it easy to upgrade from a lower edition, to a higher edition of Vista). Users would be able to “unlock” additional licenses from their original DVD. After paying for the additional copies, a key would be provided.
The number of multiple computer households is growing, so upgrading an operating system or an anti-virus, for example, becomes a expensive endeavor. I think the Family Pack promotion would be enough to convince a family with multiple computers to make the upgrade, and certainly another way for Microsoft to generate revenue from Windows. People have been advocating for a family-licensing program for quite some time now, and so hopefully, Microsoft will respond as expected.
Back in November, there was talk about their License Changes that will allow users to transfer a retail license of Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate to another Machine. This provided that you uninstall the software from the original device before installing it on another device (and that it’s not an OEM version of Vista). It appears that slowly but surely, Microsoft is starting to budge with their licensing terms. The countdown for Vista is on….
News Source: ZDNet
I would think this would be in their best interest seeing that most people won’t purchase Vista until they purchase a new computer.
I would upgrade if the price was right. That’s goes double for upgrading multiple PCs.
This would be great news for multiple pc households. I would hope that the additional licenses would be for full versions and not just upgrades for the other versions. If so, I would buy at least 1 additional license even though I currently have only one system.
After putting $400 into it you should at least get 2 licenses from the start.
I think it would be truly awesome if Microsoft did what some antivirus companies are starting to do: 1 license is valid on 3 PC’s. I think three is the magic number and software companies are starting to see that. Personally, we have two laptops and a desktop that I really care about, and a few other PC’s that are running legacy version’s of Windows or Linux. So three of my computers are all that I really care to upgrade.
you don’t need to spend $399. You can do this with the upgrade version of Ultimate for $259. Its a good deal for tweakers.
Of course the upgrade is only valid if you have a LEGAL version of XP, which many people looking to get Vista probably won’t have.