If this report from Mary Jo is true, it’s very good news:
Sources said that Microsoft will announce some time over the next few days that the company will allow Vista Ultimate customers to purchase two additional copies of Vista Home Premium for somewhere between $50 to $99 a piece.
As I noted back in August, the non-discounted price of a Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade will be $259. The non-discounted price of a Home Premium license is $159. Mary Jo’s sources are a little sketchy on the details, but based on this report the total non-discounted price for a three-PC family pack would be somewhere between $359 and $457.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. I’ll wait to see what those details are before speculating any further.
Technorati tags: Windows Vista, licensing
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
A bit off topic but your mention of Ultimate and Home Premium reminded me of it…
At home I currently have one PC I use for development and a MCE machine that’s headless; I use my 360 to stream my recorded TV and if I need to do anything to the MCE unit I simply use remote desktop.
Well, with Microsoft’s horrible, horrible licensing I’d have to shell out premium Ultimate bucks just to run my headless MCE because to get both remote desktop access AND MCE I’d need Ultimate. I know of quite a few people that use MCE the same way I do and I’m wondering just how upset they’re going to be when they pick up an upgrade copy of Home Premium only to find out that it’s not so premium after all. For that admittedly small group of people it just doesn’t make any sense to upgrade to Vista on a headless MCE machine.
It’s funny, I just purchased a HP dv9000 and it came with a free upgrade to Vista Home Premium if I purchased MCE but now I realize how silly I was, Home Premium is a downgrade from the prior MCE.
Anyway, when I first saw the title of your post I was hoping they’d cut a discount on a second & third Ultimate license, not on Home “Premium”. It’s moves like this that make me realize why the “common consumer” often views Apple as more user friendly.
I was just talking to someone else about the licensing terms for Vista — and the costs involved — and he’s on the verge of just getting an MSDN subscription and being done with it. This would be a nice half-step.