In the world I live in, taking something without paying is stealing.  If you think it's not, then I think bigger issues are going on.

IMHO, paying more for software than for the computer it runs on is a bad idea.

. . . and Vista Ultimate practically costs that much.

Frankly, $50 is where I start being very careful about what I buy, and $100 is about the cutoff of "not worth it, no matter what it does." IMHO. I managed to get Vista at a greatly reduced price through a special offer.

It may also depend on my income - with a full time job, I'd be willing to pay more, I'm sure, but right now I'm not in such a position.

I'm just saying.....You seemed to make it very official sounding...would'nt want there to be any faults in the wording...

wow! i'm impressed. somebody actually got jafo to edit one of his posts. that rarely happens. LOL

anywho, i'll be willing to spend a couple hundred bucks for an oem copy of win7. heck, i've spent more than that on a case, psu, vid card, cpu, motherboard, or memory before. i'd say 200 for the most important component of the computer is worth it. if i was a student at IU or still taking classes at IUK, i could get it for 10 bucks like it was for XP when it was relased. heck, i still have that edu copy of XP in my catalog of software. it's never used but i still have it.

Indeed. $200 is a boutique price for a commodity product. It might make sense to super-saturated PC users like a dev, and maybe even a hardcore gamer, but it is ludicrous for the general market. Especially when it really can end up being around half the cost of a new box.

And, yes, I still think they should at least *consider* some price cuts if they seriously want to help lift both retail PC sales and enterprise upgrade deals. They have a very large store of cash, theoretically collected to help the company weather a few hard years. (If these ain't rainy economic days, I don't want to be here when the sky finally opens.)

Just think about the free media coverage alone--a price cut story would doubtless win far greater 'mind share' than any of those creepy media campaigns they've run in the past few years (none of which were cheap). Link it to some spin on the EU trying for another anti-competition penalty when IE is losing share to other browsers, and you might have a few folks who tend to dislike Microsoft feeling a bit sympathetic.

I find the thought of "intuitively placed" options to be horrific...

If you can't find settings for stuff in XP, you're either retarded or don't give a shit.  In either case, you shouldn't be messing with them.  Hiding them where a moron with no clue would look just isn't fair to those of us that should be allowed near them.

"Retarded" and "moron" are a bit strong, don't you think?  Not all PC users are power users.  In fact, the majority of PC users are just average users with a basic knowledge, so Microsoft is protecting them from themselves by hiding power setting and tweaks that could crash their systems.  Makes sense as it cuts down error reports/responses, and thus support resources on issues that needn't have arisen.

Besides, any power user worth his/her salt should be able to find hidden settings with little or no trouble, so why is it even an issue?

Because the poor can't pay more than the rich and corporates...

True a corporation provides jobs by purchasing their workers services..but their owners get much profit than what they pay....

The fact that MS is not going to read this thread makes my point countless... What I said was just my opinion which I assume is quite different from yours. Sorry, I cant change it my brain wont allow me...

Though I set the price a bit higher for corporations but MS too sells its products cheaper in poor nations...

Nobody likes that directors and owners of large companies often pay themselves far more than their contributions are actually worth but charging the company itself more won't do anything to reduce their salaries. Any significant increase in costs is much more likely to result in less jobs within the company or unreasonable demands being placed on employees to make up the slack.

If you want them to pay a higher due you'd have to charge those people themselves more, not the company. Which is unfortunately next to impossible to do.

My problem with this unfortunately-durable dev fad is not sonmuch with the efforts to make 'intuitive' designs, although I believe strongly that an 'intuitive' interface is an eye-of-the-beholder thing and not some 'truth' that you can find with rigorous research. What really vexes me is the fact that Microsoft consistently makes major design choices that destroy the value that workers like me establish in ourselves by becoming skilled users.

When you radically redesign software that millions of workers are using with relative efficiency, you are in essence throwing those workers needlessly into retraining that does nothing to improve their value in the labor market. It just helps them put off the day when their IT-obssessed managers can feel confident replacing them with even newer gear and a totally inexperienced (cheap) new hire.

So, I guess that's another reason I don't think a boutique price for my OS is reasonable. If the 'improvements' were designed to both help new folks get going quickly *and* let experienced folks keep working quickly, I might think that the OS cost should be a big chunk of the total for a new box. But it ain't so yet.

p.s. Two nice things I have to say about Win 7 so far: it hopefully will have decent text-zoom at last, and the base system will no longer be cluttered with things like Outlook Express or MSN Messenger (whatever its name is these days).

Agreed - but I still think it should be the default if it's being installed on a system that is 64 bit capable.

Frankly, I don't bother with defragging in Vista/7 except to set the schedule.

Instead, I buy as much memory as possible and minimize disk use. I still have it defrag, but I reduce the neeed to worry about it.

In all honesty, I think they should just merge the two into one product that allows both upgrading and clean installs. Forget having two products at two prices.

. . . and you are right, in all honesty it's almost always far better to do a clean install than an upgrade. Usually by the time a new OS comes out it's time to clean up the computer anyways.

Yes and no. While it is true that individual tastes can vary, it is possible to collect statistics on the habits of most users, and more often than not there are very clear trends.

In addition, there are some common principles you can find in UI design. My engineering book has a chapter in UI design with the folowing three "golden rules":

1. Place the user in control.
2. Reduce the user's memory load.
3. Make the interface consistent.

I seriously doubt those principles can be argued - although sometimes the details can.

There's an article by Joel Spolsky about UI design that I recommend reading.

I like this quote of his:

This pretty much sums up what I see in a lot of places where the UI seems wrong to regular people, but power users claim it's right. The power users love having an extreme amount of customization, but regular users just want to focus on the primary task. Sometimes, the customization gets in the way of getting stuff done.

It all really boils down to this: Know your audience.

The one biggest, fatal mistake of poor UIs is that the developers swear that their way is right (and can even explain it), but it conflicts with how it's really used by the users.

Wait just 20 years MS will give Win7 for free with Vista and XP as bonus packs....

As far as free OS is concerned I think MS should release Win 98 or 2000 as free now....

OK. First, you caught me stealth-quibbilng over terms. It is the *word* "intuitive" that I find so misplaced in much public dev talk, where the general implied assumption is that intuition is a one-size-fits-all thing. More precise terms like discoverability and usability make much more sense to me if you want to start talking about actual stats.

"Know your audience" hits home with me solidly--I have to apply that in my work also. Sometimes it really can make a job easier, e.g. "Revise or cut the technical talk here so that our sales and marketing staff can follow it." But sometimes the audience is so potentially large and/or complex that getting to know them well could take near-unlimited time. I think the latter is a basic challenge for products like Windows, and their necessary scope limits seem to be pushing us 'power users' out of the mix. (We even had an NTFS user group named for us briefly--what happened?)

More to the point of my earlier threadjacking talk, I don't see why a dev team as resource-rich as Windows or Office can't do a better job of enabling 'improved' UIs to step aside whenever an experienced user would prefer a 'classic' set of controls. It strikes me as a sign of their own doubt about the choices involved in radical redesigns like the stone-cold, authoritarian ribbon. If they were truly confident that the change was for the better, they should not have hesitated to let people actively compare the old and the new within a single application or OS.