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Windows Vista To Come In 7 Flavors
Dionne writes "Microsoft is really milking it with this one: According to an Ars Technica report, there will be 7 versions of Windows Vista: Starter Edition, Home Basic Edition, Home Premium Edition, Professional Edition, Small
Business Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition." From the article: "Windows Vista Ultimate Edition is a superset of both Vista Home Premium and Vista Pro Edition, so it includes all of the features of both of those product versions, plus adds Game Performance Tweaker with integrated gaming experiences, a Podcast creation utility (under consideration, may be cut from product), and online "Club" services (exclusive access to music, movies, services and preferred customer care) and other offerings (also under consideration, may be cut from product)."
What are the odds that you'll be able to 'upgrade' from one version to the other by changing one registry key?
In Argentina, most PCs come with one flavor of Linux installed with an XP theme by default.
Most of users who don't know nothing of OSes, buy it thinking it is XP and they realize that once they already bought them.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad, more like a Shing Yang.
PC vendors lower their costs that way, but they don't inform the user about the OS installed.
Users realize they don't have XP when they try to do something that they used to, or when they try to download MSN. Then, the general line of thinking is "I can't get anything done with Linux, Linux suck" and they get a pirated copy of XP.
Back to the topic, it's clear that MS don't want to let Linux reach the user. They will encourage PC vendors to sell the Vista version that only boots on odd days and let's you hit the start button once per session. That way they get ahead with this problem.
Linux has a chance NOW. Linux is actually reaching the user NOW, but fails to demonstrate that it is actually good for the common tasks that the user does.
I'm not saying that something can't be done with Linux. The problem is that the user simply doesn't realize that yet and they get rid of Linux before they have a chance to do so.
You know, I actually remember back when home computers were new....and actually called home computers (or, sometimes, microcomputers). Back then every computer brand was utterly different, different OS, different base language, often a different processor. It was chaos and it was glorious. There were a massive amount of computer systems to choose from, from extremely light, low end, cheap systems like the Timex-Sinclair 1000, to the mid-range C-64, to the expensive IBM PC. All were different. All had a wealth of software avaliable for them. Developers wrote software for their chosen machines, their chosen OS, but often they wrote completely different versions of the same software for multiple types of machines (Visicalc was a good example of this). Nobody complained to my knowledge.
Too many people have grown up in a monopolist, monoculture society, they think computing has to be that way and always has been.
As for the different distributions of Linux....yes, they are different distributions of Linux, but they are not really different "distributions" of the same OS. Essentially they are different operating systems, each built around GNU and the Linux kernel. Do we call OS X a "distribution" of BSD? No, not really, it's a unique OS qith it's own quirks, and it's own top layer, and it's customised. Linux distros are no different. Most take GNU and the Linux kernel, and add a top layer of their own. That top layer may itelf be just mildly customised versions of the "standard" along with a few custom libraries and integrated applications (Mandriva, SuSE, etc...) or it may be more radical (GNUStep). Sometimes, they are even proprietary (Linspire). And they all usually customise the kernel to suit their needs, so between them even the kernel is different. They are all different competing operating systems, based around the same standards and low level components, rather than different "versions" of the same OS. For that, you need to look at the different versions within the same distro.
From TFA:
One final note worth mentioning is that this strategy does remove the "corporate Windows XP" option from the hands of pirates. Volume licensing for Pro, SBE, and EE may still mean that there will be copies of Windows Vista out there that don't "call home" for Windows Product Activation, but as you can see, Microsoft has removed most of the features that most pirates would want from those OSes. You won't see corporate licensing versions of Ultimate Edition.
So, no volume licences for versions with all the fancy multimedia bells and whistles (HDTV, DVD authoring, DVD ripping, etc). They seem to figure potential pirates would want these features and businesses will not. Though speaking as someone who has worked in a school's IT department I can say there's at least one environment that may well want features like that but still has enough installs to do to make per machine activiation impractical.