Jeronimo’s Weblog

I read with interest that Vista has been named Best Of 2007 in the recent CES show in Las Vegas. This doesn’t surprise me. While not the grand vision Microsoft advertised in 2003, it’s still a phenomenal offering, and certainly not the weak update the MS haters would have you believe. Those who fear it call it Windows XP Service Pack 3, but the amount of stuff MS put out this days is staggering. Not only is Vista out, but Office 2007 is as well. I have been using Office 2007 Beta 2 for months now, and let me tell you, its hard to go back to 2003 and use it!

But the main spark for this post, was when I noticed how much Vista costs. The doubters would have you believe Vista and Office are going to set you back £1000, or £500 for each. Bullshit. No company is going to pay this. Which is why the more you but, the cheaper they get, and its very affordable indeed.

But what about the plebs at home? Well if I said you could get the full version of the Ultimate edition of Vista for under £150, you would probably think I was making it up. Well check out this link - Overclockers.co.uk. I’m not endorsing the site (although I have used them before without a problem), and I know its the OEM and not the full retail, but come on. You are getting the full version of the top product, for a bargain price. Office 2007 (worth every penny) costs £205 (Overclockers.co.uk).

So you are looking at around £350 for the latest and greatest operating system available, and the very best office suite seen by man. And this is for a single license. Imagine getting a 1000 user site license, and you know the cost will drop dramatically. When you realise this, you know that Microsoft are practically giving it away.

Vista and Office 2007 are going to become the core of my new network design I am building for internal use within the organisation. I know its a gamble taking on new things, but we need to be doing this to support the vast number of Vista roll outs we’ll be seeing each year. Sure for us techie types, I might venture down the XP dual boot route, but I’d much prefer to do the next big thing in computing - virtualisation. For those times when XP is needed, I hope to just fire up my VMWare and run a pre-built virtual machine.

Like it or not, Microsoft and Vista are here, it’s to be a good year to be a techie!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 2:11 and is filed under Technology. 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.