Slashdot Mirror
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)."
Chocolate, Vanilla, Pecan, Mint, Banana and BSOD?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
So much for the anti-Linux crowd saying there's far too many distro's...
Anyone know what the major differences are between the versions then? Will schools (which is where I make a living as a sysadmin) and businesses require Enterprise edition for networks or what?
I should RTFA, eh?
What are the odds that you'll be able to 'upgrade' from one version to the other by changing one registry key?
This is going to confuse the living daylights out of people, especially non-technical users.
Home users probably won't know what version they have, and that will complicate tech support calls of all types. It'll be difficult to help people calling for aide, regardless of whether they're calling Dell tech support or their nephew.
Developers will continually have to look up what features each system supports, and may very well just end up developing for the lowest common denominator in order to maximize support across all versions.
It was difficult enough trying to get average users to understand that Windows XP Home is different from Windows XP Professional. Hell, it's difficult enough to even remember all these names, let alone remember what features are different between each.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
- Vista Secure Edition: completely redesigned kernel and win32 libraries make this edition secure against virus, worm, trojan, spyware, and phish attacks!
- Vista Compact Edition: with just the software you need, including the much appreciated MSOfficeCompact, this edition runs on your P100 with 128Mb.
- Vista Instant Edition: bootable in so many ways, this is all the software you need to boot that recaltricant box and get it working again. Comes complete with legacy support for every known device.
- Vista Grandmother Edition: simple, fast, and based on all the best of Windows Secure, this is the software you wished you'd had when your parents asked, "How do I get onto the Internet?"
- Vista Open Edition: free, and packed to the hilt with first-class open source, all verified and tuned by MicrosoftOpenLabs for that smooth experience. Comes with full source code.
My blog
As long as the average home user can get a cheaper version of their OS without the complex functions they won't ever need/use. But then I seem to be in the minority anyway, I have a legal version of XP and think the OS is a piece of software well worth paying for. Nice to see from the article that many of the features us geeks buy Pro edition of XP for are going to be included in the Premium Home edition of Vista, and that the "Pro" version is actually going to be aimed at business.
Am I the only one to think that this will be a nightmare for people in the support industry.
I'm already having a headache with 7 different editions of Windows 2003 Server and what limitations each one has. Now 7 desktop editions. Obviously they like the number 7.
Can't they just do like Apple and have 1 Client and 1 Server edition of the OS. Even RedHat has only 3 server editions and 1 desktop edition.
Nooo, MSFT has decided to milk us all the way with a product segmentation strategy. Well, I guess that they need all the money they can get with their revenues being stagnant in the past several years.
A hungry bear does not dance!
one flavor to rule them all?
Been there, done that.
- "So do you have service pack 2 installed?"
- "Uhm, maybe you should speak to my son, I am not much into this..."
- "Hold the little flag button on the bottom left of your keyboard, then push the Pause/Break button faaar up on the right at the same time"
- "Oh, something happened."
- "Can you read what is says under System?"
- "Uh, yes, Windows... copyright, oh, Service pack 2"
Usually this does not take longer than 30 secs, and will most likely work on Vista too.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
You didn't "find" the website. You own the website. You've already said you own iconnectzone.com. A Whois on winvistasecrets.com and a whois on iconnectzone.com gives the same owner: Linlay Lee Kien On. Most of your comments spam these links. The Slashdot community doesn't give a shit about some Micro$oft-promoting website. So get lost.
Ooo lets see... Educated Guess Time;
I predict that...
General people will buy the cheapest version that runs all applications. That version will be bundled with majority of the home computers. That will probably be the 'Basic' Home version. Don't expect it to be any cheaper than current Home Edition - MS has a monopoly, no reason to undercut in such situation. Premium crap will most likely be priced like today's Pro version, and will only sell to the crowd that today buys Media Center Edition.
If there are feature differences that matter to the applications (such as games or normal productivity apps) everyone will ignore crippled versions - bye bye starter ed. Dunno why MS can't figure this out.
Ultimate Edition will probably be sold to the Alienware/Dell XPS crowd that is too clueless. Rest will ignore the MS software clutter - especially since the ultimate edition has 'subscription' written all over it - the OS itself might work without one, but if it adds any downloadable extras, those will definitely want your personal information, and probably monthly fee sooner or later. I guess MS has gotten addicted to the mothly income it gathers from XBox Live subscribers. Someone has probably calculated how much they'd make if they could milk monthly fees from (some) Windows users as well.
As far as Warez goes - unless the 'Corporate Pro/Enterprise editions' are crippled in some way that matters to home user (lack of MCE features doesn't really qualify), that will be the version(s) that will make rounds - just like today. Additionally the 'Ultimate' version will be cracked to satisfy the 'Must have best version' crowd that previously cackled and downloaded warez versions of such gems as Win2003 Advanced Server for their home PCs so they could have the 'best' Windows. However, most won't want to bother with the extra bloat - or it will be ripped out of the Ultimate and plugged to a suitably modded Corporate version.
Just my 2 cents...
At first, I thought having this many versions of the same product would be confusing to customers, but then I realised that M$ has an easy way to determine needs:
Customer: I want to upgrade my Windows 2000 machine to Vista. Which version do I need?
M$: Oh that's easy. How much money do you have?
Yes. Chinese crackers will eventually speed up the OS, make clippy do a blue hadouken and unlock Microsoft Bob as a playable character.
Then Microsoft will be forced to release Windows Vista Champion Edition.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Just so that less people are confused, can we please make sure that only the Ultimate edition gets leaked onto BitTorrent? That will avoid most of the confusion. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Just to be on the safe side, everybody will buy the most expensive version they can afford. It's called "differential pricing".
That's the last straw. I'm moving to linux, where the choices are much simpler.
Pirated Edition.
Starter Edition, Home Basic Edition, Home Premium Edition, Professional Edition, Small Business Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition
I don't care how many flavors they have. Just give me a Working Edition
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Backstory
I make my living as a software architect for a large national corporation using the Win32 platform. I've got over 15 years coding & design experience.
I started out with Borland products, but slowly migrated to MS products due to the following factors:
1) Tools were built by the makers of the OS
2) API Documentation
3) Microsoft's desire to support the development community
4) OS stability - Laugh if you like, but at the time there wasn't much else to run on an 8088.
Screw The Developers
Recently, Microsoft has decided that the development community needed more "options" - In other words, let's screw all of the MSDN Universal holders into "Upgrading" to a new type of subscription - Therefore changing the concept of "Universal" to mean "Kinda sorta, but not really". You no longer can get "EVERYTHING" any more.
Screw The Consumer
Next - They're moving on to Vista (what a STUPID name) with 7 different flavors. They are "creating" a compositing desktop using the graphics hardware and touting it as the next "New Thing(tm)". Instead of using a bitmapped desktop, they've gone to this "new innovation". Uh - Mac OSX has done this since day 1. Nothing new here.
Along with "Vista", they are incorporating many "new" things - Security concepts that are really just hacks on top of a horrible idea.
Fundamentally, Microsoft has refused to accept that they themselves perpetuate the security problems they currently have. Most Win32 developers have been bottle fed to accept that the local user has admin rights. They code everything with this assumption. Because of this, Microsoft has had a VERY difficult time securing the desktop. Microsoft has no choice but to try and design around a problem of their own creation.
Fact is you cannot secure a machine where there is, effectively, no security. I say "effectively" because if all users have all rights, then where is the security?
Combine the Two Above - Rinse/Wash/Repeat
This long diatribe is really to sum up that Microsoft has ignored the problems for so long, and is not even prepared to address them with the development community. Even their latest development "security" attempts are too little too late for such an egregious flaw.
And now, to top it off, they're going to attempt to baffle the world with bullshit by releasing 7 versions of an OS - What a fantastically stupid idea.
The downward spiral started many years ago, and will end with people like me leaving the platform for something that truly performs - For something not built on technical quicksand.
(BTW - I type this from my G5 Mac in my home where the last remaining PC is serving as print server and remote desktop to host VS.NET so that I can work at home - They're are now 4 other Macs in the house)
Arrrr...more resources for me to plunder!!
Life is not for the lazy.
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.