Vista Home Basic: 99.95 USD
Vista Home Premium: 129.95 USD
Vista Business: 199.95 USD
Vista Ultimate: 219.95 USD
Expected Windows 7 Home Premium: 50 USD
Expected Windows 7 Professional: 100 USD
OS X Snow Leopard upgrade: 29 USD
Why is Snow Leopard upgrade so cheap?
Snow Leopard for End User is only a tuned OS. Faster, smaller, slightly prettier. Oh there is QuickTime X with YouTube upload.
In case of Corporate User it looks a bit better. We have, out of the box, Exchange support. Which definitely will help in getting Apple into Corporate world.
Nevertheless it's still little for Home User, Creative Agencies. All the new amazing functionality (Open CL + Grand Central Dispatch) is hidden deeply inside. No visible fireworks. Moreover this technology will only be available when developers will adopt it. Then we will have fireworks. Our existing Mac will be faster. We'll be getting more horse power from the existing equipment. I know it sounds unbelievable but that's what GCD + OpenCL brings.
(GCD: faster thread creation, threads scheduling on OS level - optimized for available CPUs, OpenCL: High level standard for performing calculations on GPU - graphics card, 64bits is a minor player here)
So the only issue is how to motivate programmers to re-implement their existing code (not just recompile) for the new OS. Definitely with this move backward compatibility will be dropped, so we need the OS to be deployed as wide as possible. We have to somehow promise the developers/software houses that this OS will be the most popular and they can safely build their apps on Snow Leopard fundament.
To sum up: despite this OS is a great technical masterpiece it has no WOW factor, it's not selling itself to Home Users. As long as it is not popular there will be no programs using GCD & OpenCL.
How can it be sold?
Add tiny gadgets and cut the price.
(Maintaining less product lines is always cheaper, let's not forget about recession...)




