Microsoft hits Europeans with hefty Anytime Upgrade prices

04.08.2009
Microsoft may have denied that it's gouging European customers with its Windows 7 pricing, but an analysis by Computerworld shows that EU buyers will be paying as much as 163% more for some of the company's in-place Anytime Upgrades.

In late June, Bill Veghte, the senior vice president for the Windows business group, rejected claims by a British financial newspaper that European consumers would pay more for Windows 7 because of a move it made -- since retracted -- to dump Internet Explorer (IE) from the new OS.

Follow-up messages from Microsoft's public relations firm at the time to a Computerworld story that concluded Europeans would pay up to twice as much as U.S. customers for packaged copies of Windows 7, calling its headline "inaccurate."

But prices of the recently-announced are even more expensive for European Union (EU) customers. Anytime Upgrades let users move up the Windows 7 edition stack by buying, say, an upgrade from Starter, the version slated for the very cheapest netbooks, to Home Premium simply by purchasing a product key to "unlock" the more expensive edition's features.

Anytime Upgrades will be available starting Oct. 22, the Windows 7 debut date.

Microsoft has pitched the Anytime Upgrades to Wall Street as one way it hopes to boost Windows revenue, and has been most aggressive in touting them for netbook owners, who may want to move up to Home Premium. "A customer may purchase a netbook thinking they would primarily use it for e-mail," a Microsoft spokesman said last week. "Over time, they find they are using that netbook as their primary every-day PC. That person then decides they want their netbook to do more."