Who’s buying new PCs with Windows Vista Home Basic? Judging by the
name, you’d assume those OS editions would be loaded on underpowered
machines headed for tract homes in the burbs and studio apartments in
the city. But you’d be wrong.
Based on my observations of the PC market over the past year or two,
I think consumers have rejected Home Basic in favor of Home
Premium. But small, budget-conscious businesses have embraced the
low-end OS.
In
one large sample I looked at, nearly three out of every five machines
destined for small business included Windows Vista Home Basic.
Small-business buyers are apparently able to look past that name, and
PC makers are happy to accommodate them. The primary appeal of Home
Basic isn’t technology, it’s cold hard cash. Vista Home Basic runs
Windows apps just fine, and it’s dirt cheap. Dell, one of the world’s
two largest PC suppliers, in fact, is pushing Home Basic as the
preferred option for many computers aimed at the small business market.
Take Dell’s Vostro 200,
which is aimed squarely at the small-business market and starts at $269
with a Celeron 430 processor, 512MB of RAM, and no monitor. A much more
capable machine with a Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 19-inch
monitor sells for $449. All three machines in this line come with
Windows Vista Home Basic. To upgrade to Vista Business or downgrade to
XP Pro is another $99, which represents a huge percentage of the system
cost.
The phenomenon is equally pronounced if you look at the Vostro notebook line, where more than half of all available configurations, 13 out of 24, include Vista Home Basic. By contrast, Dell’s consumer notebook line
offers 34 separate configuration, of which only three start with Vista
Home Basic. The remaining 90% come with Vista Home Premium (only one
model includes Vista Ultimate by default).
You can see the same mix of Windows versions if you go to a business-focused reseller like CDW and look at a list of the cheapest available desktop computers,
sorted by price in ascending order. Five of the 10 PCs on the list,
including models from HP Compaq and Lenovo, come with Vista Home Basic.
(Once you get past those low-end PCs, however, almost all computers
sold at CDW include Vista Business.)
So how popular is Vista Home Basic, and who’s buying it?
Who’s buying Vista Home Basic? See the details by segment –>
