PC maker Acer has accused Microsoft of shipping an inadequate low-end version of the upcoming Vista operating system to force more customers to move to the more expensive Vista Home Premium edition. Acer VP Jim Wong says that Microsoft’s own marketing has undercut Basic, since it will lack the fancy user interface and media capabilities [...]
Oracle agreed to pay a $98.5M fine, resulting from overcharging on government contracts by Oracle’s PeopleSoft subsidiary. (The overcharging took place before Oracle acquired PeopleSoft .) The government is always supposed to get the “best price”, but in some cases, other corporate customers got bigger discounts. By law, the government is entitled to those discounts. [...]
You can’t actually buy the long-delayed new operating system from Microsoft, but this week saw Vista prices revealed. First, the Microsoft Canada site posted prices in Canadian dollars earlier this week, then quickly took down the page, but not before Ed Bott of ZDNet could post the information. Bott makes the good point that you [...]
An alert reader sent in this press release about Schott Systeme a CAD-CAM software vendor, which has held prices constant for a decade and does not charge for support. Annual support charges typically run about 20% of the license fee, meaning that over four years, customers pay as much in support as they do for [...]
We’ve commented several times on the problems confronting software vendors who have historically priced their products on a per-CPU basis (see posts on Oracle and BEA), as technology has made the very concept of the CPU rather ambiguous. Now the Unix Guardian has suggested an alternative– pricing applications based on the amount of memory they [...]
