Finally... get rid of the silly middleman.

This has been a long time coming.

Like I'm going to spend $150 or more on a download and trust that, if something goes awry, I'll be able to sort this out over the phone with someone half a world away? No thanks. And this is not intended to be a slam on the MS phone support staff in any way, shape, or form. No, if I'm going to spend that much money on such DRM-heavy software, I'll go to Best Buy or whomever and get a copy I can hold in my hands. At the very least, it is more concrete evidence that I purchased the OS.

So here's my question. Lets say you decide to use the 32 bit version at first for some random reason (celeron that doesn't support 64 bit or something lets say), then you upgrade your cpu to a C2D and want to also upgrade to 64 bits, does that mean you also have to pay M$ again just to get the 64 bit version?

Hey why don't they use bitorrent to distribute it and lower their bandwidth cost! /genius

"Vista, Office 2007 to be downloadable legally"

unless someone mistakenly puts it in their p2p shared folder. hehe LOL!

So now you can buy your OS via Steam as well?

Same price, hmm. I'd have thought one or the other would've been cheaper. I wonder what MS's cost of the bandwidth for the download is vs. manufacturing and distributing the physical media.....

OEM! OEM! OEM!

As long as one can download the ISO's as I currently do via MSDN, I'm all for it.

This kind of a slap in the face of their e-tail distributors. I mean, the target market for the e-tailers are people who, for one reason or another, prefer to-the-door service, right? Who does this new scheme serve other than those who would have ordered from Newegg, etc?

erm big deal? They're selling it at the same price, so basically it makes them more profit since they save on packaging and manuals etc... it's not a great deal imho.

As for convenience... well maybe for some, who knows.

Same cost? Bad idea. I find it hard to believe that people would rather wait 3-4 hours for this to download, rather than drive 15 minutes, or take city transit for 30 minutes to just pick up a physical copy. Useful for those that live in the country... but then they don't have the best broadband, so they'd have to likely wait for a few days to finish this hefty download.

It's like Microsoft saying the packaging and shipping costs absolutely nothing (nothing but increased profit margins!)

Me not like. Neither the physical media and packaging, nor the download bandwidth, are very expensive from Microsoft's end since they buy so much of both. Some sort of incentive structure needs to be in place for the downloadable version before I would bite -- either offer the chance to receive the physical media later at a nominal media-mail postage charge (+$5?), or else offer a discount for purchasing online only (-$15).

not for me.

The only thing I want from this:
- Register and enter CC information
- Download a self extracting EXE that builds an ISO
- Email address is mailed a key

As a bonus, it would be very nice to buy more keys without physical medium.

Honestly, i'm looking forward to what retail stores do to try to get people to come in and buy Vista. Does anyone remember when Windows ME came out? They had the $50 upgrade from 98se promotion. Staples gave away at least $50 of software when you purchased ME. I walked out of that store with two bags full of software and a couple rebates. I knew ME was bad when i bought but all the free software i got was more than worth it.

I'm hoping something similar for Vista. Has anyone heard of any retail store promos for Vista yet?

Sweet! Tho I already have the MSDN version. But digital downloads ftw! Games, movies etc.