3 ms·

There was so much bad PR, noone would bother. They tried to give corporate customers (select agreement sized ones) free copies and they said no.

mgkimsal 15y ago
They didn't try with me. They didn't try with any of my friends. I think they're trying with the wrong crowd. Interesting side thought here (at least to me). MS has traditionally done very well selling to the larger enterprise market. As the headcount in those orgs go down, will MS' influence drop? Newer people coming in will probably have come from smaller orgs where MS is less prevalent, and when there's overall fewer people at an org, there's fewer people to influence/market to. I tell a lie. I had/have an Ultimate Vista that I won at a local user group raffle. I've installed it, but in virtual machines, which I've lost a couple times. Getting it re set up by going through the 'call up and get reactivated' is always a pain. :(
- chrisjsmith 15y ago
  They probably are - I agree. They should make personal licenses cheap and ubiquitous therefore creating mindset. Most smaller orgs just buy machines and live with what is on them these days and only tech-focused companies seem to care what they run. The entire NHS (UK's free health system) seems to run on Windows 2000 and XP quite happily still because that's what the machines came with at the time.
  - jimbokun 15y ago
    As long as you can upgrade the browser, OS probably doesn't matter for many organizations.
bxr 15y ago
I'm sure plenty of end users would have taken the offer, thats just because they're corporate customers. They never want the brand new thing. Not only is the supporting an os upgrade a pain in the ass long process that will also involve a lot of waiting around for all your vendors to get off their asses about supporting the new thing, at the time the prevailing wisdom was to never use windows before the first service pack. XP didn't really get good until sp2.

mgkimsal 15y ago

They didn't try with me. They didn't try with any of my friends. I think they're trying with the wrong crowd. Interesting side thought here (at least to me). MS has traditionally done very well selling to the larger enterprise market. As the headcount in those orgs go down, will MS' influence drop? Newer people coming in will probably have come from smaller orgs where MS is less prevalent, and when there's overall fewer people at an org, there's fewer people to influence/market to. I tell a lie. I had/have an Ultimate Vista that I won at a local user group raffle. I've installed it, but in virtual machines, which I've lost a couple times. Getting it re set up by going through the 'call up and get reactivated' is always a pain. :(

chrisjsmith 15y ago
They probably are - I agree. They should make personal licenses cheap and ubiquitous therefore creating mindset. Most smaller orgs just buy machines and live with what is on them these days and only tech-focused companies seem to care what they run. The entire NHS (UK's free health system) seems to run on Windows 2000 and XP quite happily still because that's what the machines came with at the time.
- jimbokun 15y ago
  As long as you can upgrade the browser, OS probably doesn't matter for many organizations.

bxr 15y ago

I'm sure plenty of end users would have taken the offer, thats just because they're corporate customers. They never want the brand new thing. Not only is the supporting an os upgrade a pain in the ass long process that will also involve a lot of waiting around for all your vendors to get off their asses about supporting the new thing, at the time the prevailing wisdom was to never use windows before the first service pack. XP didn't really get good until sp2.