What is the price of Windows 7?

Windows 7 is being awaited eagerly. And as I know some of my friends, they have started saving their pocket money suspecting Windows 7 is gonna cost them a lot. How much? While Windows Vista, despite having absolutely nothing to brag about (except the looks) was heavily priced, everyone assumes that such a positive pre-release impression of Windows 7 will help the ever so greedy and ambitious Microsoft to tag a price that in itself may defy many to have a taste of the 7 cake. Though we don’t have a news yet about the pricing, speculations are that it will be a costly upgrade and we presume it will be around $250- $275.

Dell evidently knows, because as CNet News reports, one of the company’s executives has spoken publicly about the pricing. A Dell spokesperson eventually said,

If there’s one thing that may influence adoption, make things slower or cause customers to pause, it’s that generally the ASPs (average selling price) of the operating systems are higher than they were for Vista and XP.

The possible time of declaration

• FPP (Full Packaged Product) Pricing - Microsoft plans to communicate this to retailers in mid-May 2009
• Public Pricing Announcement - mid-June 2009.

Windows 7 - Is Microsoft looking Efficient after a decade?

I will love to believe so. The beta RCs have come out like a breeze - quick, smooth, without too many bugs though the Windows 7 beta RC2 had some limitations but to be very frank, Microsoft was well aware of it.

Windows 7 is going to be less clumsy about similar sounding names of different versions of the same operating system (say for e.g. Windows Vista had so many of them) where people donno what to do with them and what exactly is more or less in them.

Windows 7 will come in six different flavors, but Microsoft says two versions –

• Windows 7 Home Premium and
• Windows 7 Professional

This will fit the needs of the majority of customers and will be the only ones sold through retail.

Windows 7 Upgrades Pricing and Conditions

• You can move upto the next version without losing any feature in which you are in. But you must make sure you have the necessary hardware to equip you with to be compatible.
• If customers want to move from one version up to the next, there will be no trade-off on features. All features of the previous version will be available in the higher version.
• The consumer features, including for example Windows Media Center, will be available in Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 Enterprise (through Software Assurance) offerings.
  [For business users]

Just for your reference, etail-boxed copies of Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows XP Home Edition cost $239 and $200 at launch, so we can expect it to be around $250- $275 mark if not more as we have alredy said above.

So no exact pricing as yet. But you can bookmark this page coz we are gonna update this with any piece of news we get our hands onto about Windows 7 pricing. Stay with us.
[TechARP (a Windows enthusiast blog) has previously speculated the release candidates quite specificially. They have given us the information about upgrades features and declaration time]