I have to agree with the user here, the pricing for family pack has dropped Windows 7 off the Christmas list for me too.. ;-)
Found the following text at new egg, interesting user review:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6832116775&cm_re=windows_7_family_pack_upgrade-_-32-116-775-_-Product
Pros: Nothing much to criticize with the Windows 7 product itself: it works better than any Microsoft OS in recent memory, certainly better than Vista and even XP... although Apple's Leopard and Snow Leopard are still slicker, sturdier and more reliable, IMHO.
Cons: Unfortunately, Microsoft's licensing and marketing games are as outrageously abusive of their customers as ever! The "time-limited" family pack offering is a totally unjustifiable bait-and-switch ripoff, with the per-seat *regular* Win 7 pricing grossly inflated - way beyond what the product is actually worth next to a superior Apple alternative and several FREE, equally good Linux-based OS products. Add to that the fact that Microsoft's fine-print licensing terms are deliberately confusing, misleading and written to encourage people to buy stuff they either don't need or can't legally use even after the initial *come-on* payment has been made... and you have a flim-flam business model that Bernie Madoff might have designed.
Other Thoughts: Admittedly, I'm not a great fan of M$ products in general, although my professional IT job has me working with them extensively every day... At home I'm mostly Mac (from a company not without its own greed issues, I might add!) and, increasingly, Linux (which is rapidly improving as a desktop OS, just as it earlier took over a big chunk of the server market.) But after evaluating Win 7 at work for awhile, I was impressed enough to plan on setting up some Windows partitions on my home machines... But alas, no longer:
The elimination of M$ family pack pricing in the US market has again pushed their OS off *my* Christmas list! I will stick with Ubuntu, exclusively, on my non-Apple boxes. Frankly, it simply offends me to submit to Microsoft's business practices, no matter what the technical merits of their latest OS are. I don't submit to robbery!
