What’s It Going to Cost Me?

Continuing on a theme, Appleinsider
estimates that “nearly half of all iPhone users … jumped at the
opportunity to enhance the functionality of their handsets by
installing the free iPhone Software 3.0 update” within the first
week of the software update’s release. However, the very same
software update that iPod Touch users can also apply has seen
extremely limited adoption.

According to Appleinsider’s sources,
within four days of the software lease, 44% of iPhone users applied
the 3.0 software update while only 1% of iPod Touch downloaded and
installed the very same software update.

The difference? Apple uses different
accounting methods for the iPhone and iPod lines. As a result, since
the initial release of the iPod Touch, Apple has charged a nominal
$10 price tag on software updates.

Considering that I rationalized that
consumers, much like a business, preform a rough cost-benefit
analysis when considering if they should preform a software upgrade
or not, this bit of evidence presents something different, that
consumers will consider adopting a software upgrade when there is no
direct cost associated with the update.

Apply this bit of information to the
Windows world and well, it shouldn’t shock anyone that Microsoft
recently announced that the upcoming Windows 7 release, set for this
fall, for consumer versions will be less expensive than similar Vista
upgrades.

Microsoft will also eschew the
traditional limitation that to qualify for the upgrade pricing a
user must be upgrading from the immediately preceding software
version. That is Windows XP users and Vista users will qualify for
the upgrade price, whereas traditionally only Vista owners would
qualify.

And if that wasn’t enough, for a
limited time Microsoft has cut the price by 50% for those who
pre-order their upgrade before July 11^th.

Now the question is, will consumers
bite?