Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"My colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is reflexively skeptical about my report of a Windows 7 Family Pack. In fact, he says, his "OEM contacts" are unaware of any such product and one "source that has been reliable in the past" tells him the language referring to that product has been pulled from the license agreement. Fortunately, some of Adrian's commenters have better sources than he does. One points to a product code, GFC-00236, that produces some very interesting search results. Like a set of product listings from Expercom that includes a WINDOWS 7 FAMILY PACK/ HOME PREMIUM UPGRADE (GFC-00236) with a listed price of $136.95."

There's not much more to say here - this price point seems to make sense. MSRP is probably $149 USD, and street price will be a bit less than that. It lines up nicely with the $50/copy of Windows 7 that's going on right now

Of course you can't please everyone - check out this comment over on Ed Bott's post:

"The most silly thing about the family pack is that it allows 3 upgrades. Our family of 4 has 7 computers (2 netbooks, 3 notebooks and 2 desktops) with 3 of them also running virtual machines from time to time for web security. How many families have only 3 computers? If MS wants to keep my business they have to do better. If I need to upgrade, Linux will look too attractive to ignore."

This comment made me chuckle - this guy is complainging about getting a new operating system for $50 per computer? That's a dramatic reduction from Windows Vista, and in my books a hell of a deal. This guy needs TEN copies of Windows 7 (if you count the three virtual machines) and he expects that for, what, $99 or something? Come back to planet earth buddy...

"Thanks to a tip from Kristan Kenney, I took a close look at the agreements embedded in the License folder of the latest leaked builds of Windows 7. This is no longer a beta license agreement and is presumably very close to the final agreement that customers will accept. The agreements for retail copies of Windows 7 Home Premium contain this eye-opening clause..."

This news is a few days old, but I thought it was worth sharing for those who hadn't heard about it yet: it looks like Microsoft is gearing up to offer a three-pack license of Windows 7 for home users. If this news is accurate, and pricing is reasonable ($199 or less) this is a significant moment for Microsoft. I've been harping on this issue of family pack licensing for years, and I've never seen a glimmer that Microsoft actually understood why this was important. The millions of "newish" computers out there still running Windows XP instead of Vista is a testament to not only the bad public perception, but also the sheer cost of upgrading multiple computers in a household. Especially now that Vista-era machines can easily run Windows 7, the issue of whether or not people will upgrade becomes a criticial one. Microsoft needs to make this work.