“The Great Windows 95 Trade-In Program”

Oh man, Richard Childress nailed it.

We should let people walk into their nearest Comp-U-Buy with their copy of any flavor of Win9x and give them a copy of Windows XP SP2 for free. And, if they happen to need a beefier computer to run XP, and they trade in a copy of Win9x at the time, we should take the cost of the OS off the price of the computer.

Not only do we get rid of a significant portion of Win9x in the world, reducing our support costs, but we get XPSP2 into more hands, stimulate PC purchasing and reduce the number of versions of Windows that ISVs have to support. Of course, we eat it on the price of XP itself, but I bet the savings in support would make up for it.

Who else thinks that Richard Childress is absolutely right?!? Let’s hear it!