Barry--
The word there is not version; those would be NT/ME/2K
XP/Vista/Blackcomb/Vienna/Figi it would be edition and afaik that hasn't
been announced yet. I have been told by the Vista team associated with
launch that the EULA is still under discussion, and I suspect that those
prices are being shaped up possibly with a view of some of the pricing that
OEM will be doing. People who buy OEM pcs are going to face the same
situations in upgrades to editions, so this complicates what OEMs will be
forging as to pricing. It also raises the question as to whether there will
be significant change to the MSFT OEM named partner policy of hosing people
out of the full OS on media instead of crappy and almost always ineffective
recovery discs and partitions when someone has to fix a no boot BSOD
situation and recover their data etc.
As I have linked, Dell announced on their blog they will be providing OS on
media for Vista:
http://www.direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/10/17/3132.aspx
"Also, though this been in the works for some time before now, it's now
official. For U.S. consumer and small business customers, all systems will
now ship with an operating system disc. This change will take effect in
Europe by later next month. In Asia, things are unchanged-we've always
shipped OS discs."
CH
