Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Much of the press has made much of the fact that there are five Windows Vista editions to choose from compared to XP, which had just two - Home and Professional. My initial reaction to having so much choice about an operating system was one of recoil.
Assuming I'm going to use Vista, I hate being forced to choose between products that really take quite some time to evaluate.
In actual fact, however, there are only four choices since most of us
individual buyers will not be involved in the purchase of Vista
Enterprise.
Then of course, who wants to pay US$199 Vista Home Basic, which doesn't
give you much more than what you've got? It certainly doesn't give you
that fancy new 3-D transparent interface called Aero. You do get the
User Account Control security feature, which might just be painful
enough for you to want to turn it off.
So we're down to three choices.
Vista Home Premium for US$239 is the clear choice for home users, with
the fancy interface, the media center, Wi-Fi mobility, and
entertainment features. Vista Business for US$299 is the clear choice
for business users, with built-in back-up and security features. And if
you want a hamburger with the works, which combines all the features of
Vista Home Premium and Vista Business, you can pay through the nose for
Vista Ultimate at US$399.
Now I want to make one thing clear to all my US readers who quite
justifiably think they're being stung terribly by the above prices.
You're lucky you live in the US. As we've seen from the prices on the
Microsoft Canada site, you'll be getting Vista for 10-15% less than
your North American neighbours.
As for us poor folk down under, Microsoft here tells me that pricing
has not been finalized and no date has been set yet for release of the
bad news. However, if the Canadian prices are anything to go by, a copy
of Vista Ultimate could be A$600, while Home Premium could be around
A$350.
My goodness, being a software monopolist is a great business. Two
things: think of how much money Microsoft is going to make from Vista
in 2007 and what happened to Novell's claim that this was going to be
the year of the Linux desktop? Office 2007? Now that's another story.
David Bass
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