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Windows 7 To Come In Multiple Versions
Crazy Taco writes "Tom's Hardware reports on newly discovered screenshots that reveal Microsoft is planning to release their newest version of Windows in multiple confusing versions ... again. The information comes from the latest version of the Windows 7 beta, build 7025 (the public beta is build 7000), and shows a screen during installation that asks the user which version of the OS he or she would like to install. Who's up for guessing what the difference is between Windows 7 'Starter' and Windows 7 'Home Basic?'"
Windows Starter edition comes without the Pipes screensaver?
I mean, my copy of the beta from TechNet says right on the login screen 'Windows 7 Ultimate'.
That would imply a product selection similar to Vista...
If I remember right, starter is a stripped down version they just sell in developing countries at a big discount in at attempt to combat some piracy by giving users a low priced option. Home would just be home again like in XP. Business would be enterprise. It is the ones after that where it gets pointless and confusing. They would do better to stick with home and pro. Then an ultimate after that if they just MUST toss in extras.
?
I've got big issues with artifically crippled software, where all versions come on the same install media.
It's like buying a car with 12 cylinders and having a switch hidden under the hood somewhere that controls the number of cylinders used. You buy the budget model, still have to cart around the weight of all 12 cylinders, but only get to use 4 of them.
- There is no point, it's like a sphere -
I always wondered why they didn't just call it Windows 7 or whatever code name and then distribute it with application packs, which would include application packs such as:
server app pack
home/media app pack
basics/offic app pack
The way they do it, joe public can't really be sure what version they have. Hell, there are a lot of end users that don't know if they are currently running XP or Vista (but you can tell by complaints about performance LOL).
I think that Ubuntu, Fedora and others could use with that sort of packaging also. By simply distributing the basic distro and setting up repositories for each application pack. That would make it easy to get a media server based on abc linux set up and maintained.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Priced low enough that you couldn't be arsed to ask for a refund
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Except your car comes with all the features, it's just that they disable the ones you didn't pay for, and call the cops on you if you get them working by yourself.
(The Vista/7 DVD has the same content for all versions, your product key controls which version is installed. Thus if you choose to skip key entry at install time, it has to ask you which version you want to install.)
In court, Gates also argued that multiple versions of Windows would essentially stifle competition by confusing consumers and putting developers "into a situation like the computer industry was before the PC came along." He said consumers would face a jarring experience due to multiple Windows versions customized by PC makers and uncertainty about the interface or whether applications would run on them.
So what changed, Bill?
To confuse things further: many of those versions also come in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors.
Why Win7 is not purely 64 bit is beyond me - any recent machine can run the 64 bit version, any older machine should be running XP anyway.
All I care about is that my new machine is Windows 7 Compatible!
</snark>
Fnord.
Salesman: Now, I can sell you this command line only version of Buntu, but of course you want more than that don't you? You are a Man who knows his Linux. Am I right?
...
.. but 'Pen-Ultimate?'?...
... bandwidth, you have to share the release till you have handed out 4 full copies?
The Mark: Um, yeah.
Salesman: Good, I can also sell you this full version of Ubuntu, all the Gnome goodness one could ask for.
The Mark: What about Amarok? Does it come with
Salesman: OOOoooh, you want Kubuntu then? Not a problem, we can sell you that too.
The Mark: But, I like the partition editor in Gn....
Salesman: Buntu Pen-Ultimate...gotcha, just a little more cash for a Gnome/KDE love fest.
The Mark: That sounds great
Salesman: Oh, you want the goodies, like an SSH server, and extra packages?
The Mark: Yeah, I um..
Salesman: Not an issue my good man, we even have financing!
The Mark: Does that include things like databases and Apache?
Salesman: Oh, no. That is just a bit more, sorry. Tell you what though, you have pluck, I like that. I'll cut you a deal.
The Mark: Really!?
Salesman: Sure, Lets see....2000 add 98 carry the 7 and ME oh my! Lets go talk to our finance department, do you prefer a 5 or 7 year loan? Things are rather tight these days I hope you have colateral like a house?
===
Epilogue
===
Friend: So the price was
The Mark: Yeah, go figure.
Friend: For 7 years?
The Mark: Releases, but they come out twice a year, so 3 and a half.
Friend: Harsh, I am just going to spend my $300 plus software costs on 7.
The Mark: You do that man.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
...but the single, common user experience is a big selling point for fruity products among people I know. Microsoft obviously can't attain a similar degree of this without controlling PC hardware, but having a single version of Windows 7 would help immensely. Joe the User won't understand why his PC is different from his wife's under the same operating system. Most people can't be bothered with learning about the different versions of the same thing. Windows should be Windows should be Windows.
Where "OK" obviously means "down $500, and stuck with a bloated 3-legged dog".
Windows 7 is a marketing attempt to remove the negativity associated with the Vista marketing campaign and name. Instead of rolling out vista with a new service pack, they are rolling out "windows 7". In reality, windows 7 is a bunch of delayed features and vista bug fixes. They HAVE to keep the same versioning system as windows vista becuase of licensing tools already in place and the way the development teams are setup. The vista team is working on the Windows 7 stuff too, as opposed to having a seperate dedicated team (which will come later). So from a business standpoint, the internal resources have no need to be rearranged for a simple marketing change.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Well, they are trying to trick people by getting you to buy an OS
Thats all you had to say.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
(Sung to Surfing USA)
Everybody is turfing',
Cross the USA,
Everybody is turfing',
Turfing' USA.
What a non-story. Windows 7 should be the next service pack for Vista, but then they wouldn't get to charge for it.
Sad news. I hate their tiered approach. They purposely cripple the cheap versions so that some key function you need requires you to pay a hundred bucks or more for a single feature.
I'm actually pleased enough with Ubuntu and Gnome that I think I have installed my last Windows image at home, except for my work box, and that license is paid for.
MS has simply become too expensive for too little in return, and the options out there in Open Source, and even on the Mac side with it's more up front cost for hardware offer more bang for the buck with less stress and lost time spent fixing the OS.
Thanks but no thanks...
I somehow got roped into the Microsoft Partner Research Panel. It's essentially a mailing list with highly detailed surveys about their products. I figured this ended up in some statistics that are eventually bleached and skewed in their Executive Reports, but heck, it's worth it for the possibility that I might a little bit of my opinion voiced.
Yesterday they sent one out that asked very pointed questions about XP, Vista, 7, 98/ME/2009, Linux, and Mac OS. Things like "On a scale of 1 to 9, rate how likely you are to develop solutions on one of these platforms".
They included questions about likely we would be to upgrade systems to Vista if 7 were released soon (Yup, I answered "Extremely Unlikely"). There were also focused questions on the versions available and if it was more/less confusing. I specifically wrote a comment on how the multiple versions serve as an obstacle.
I wonder when this starts to eat into real profit. I mean, if they have to un-bundle IE for European distribution, they just multiplied their versions by at least 2. Checking MSDN, there are a huge number of flavors for XP when you also add in the 32/64 bit, Embedded, Media, Tablet, Volume License, and other types beyond Home and Pro. At least 50. Yup, 50! And that's XP!
I, for one, won't be buying it.
If you want to cut out the middle man but still support your favorite artists, you can always download it from TPB and then donate $15 directly to Microsoft. Or go to one of their concerts and buy a t-shirt.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I don't know what all the flap is about. No matter what distinctions Microsoft will impose it'll boil down to just two versions... Server, and Bot-net!
Basic is baseline (like XP home)
Home Premium includes media center (like XP media center edition)
Business is basically XP Professional
Ultimate is XP professional + media center
So maybe they just need a name change.
Home
Home + Media Center
Business
Business + Media Center
Maybe make it easier:
Home*
Business*
* "And if you call in the next five minutes, we'll throw in Media Center for only $29.95!"
The textbook says, if a company is in a monopoly position, the best way to maximize revenues is for them to differentiate their output so as to take away as much consumer surplus possible under the demand curve.
So, of course, they differentiate their product.
What they've failed to understand is this factoid completely relies on the consumer's ability to differentiate between the products! If 100,000 Joe Schmoes don't know the difference between Home Basic and Home Premium, then guess what, revenue from the two will just be the average prices between the two as Joe Schmoes around the world toss coins to decide which to buy. Some will buy the "better" (more expensive) one because they can't tell but want to "be safe", while others will get the cheaper one because they can't tell and want to save some money. MS will have been better off just selling an all-encompassing "Home" version at a price set at the averages of the Starter and two Home versions and not incur the overhead costs of differentiating the two versions in the first place.
Bottom line:
The people who can differentiate between Start, Home Basic and Home Premium won't bother with either, and the people who can't won't care which one they get.
I mean, three different versions for non-geeks?? Of all products to differentiate, they choose the one aimed at the customer demographic who are least equipped to make an informed decision between all options.
Geez, God help you Microsoft.
First of all, all of those flavors were available for Vista as well. Starter was only marketed for emerging markets.
Second of all, all of those builds have been available since the early days of Windows 7. This isn't something they recently added in to 7025, it's been there the entire time as a carry-over from Vista.
Just because these versions are randomly available in a pre-release version of an OS doesn't mean they'll still be there by the time it's actually released.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Typical Microsoft. Anyone remember Windows 3.0 real mode, protected mode, and virtual mode? At least there was some excuse for that. But it had the beneficial effect (for Microsoft) of soaking up most of organizations' development efforts just trying to target, optimize, and SQA products for three different kinds of Windows, leaving precious little bandwidth for work on, oh, UNIX or OS/2 or Mac OS.
I once worked for a Fortune 500 company where people literally used the word "port" to describe what needed to be done to keep a piece of software working under Windows, as in "We're porting the code from Windows 3.1 to Windows for Workgroups."
IBM did the same thing when they were dominant. Multiple versions of everything and small changes mostly for changes' sake. Big organizations couldn't afford to ignore IBM, and were kept very busy tracking all that stuff.
People build careers on the personal knowledge of the various changes IBM kept making, and people build careers now on their personal knowledge of the changes and variations in Microsoft products.
Lousy engineering. Great way to exploit a monopolistic position in the marketplace.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
the answer is presumably because they consider piracy to be wrong, but don't want shell out money for the full version.
Presumably, but if that's the case it's not terribly smart.
In most developing markets you'll find the consumers to be less savvy about high tech IP issues like copyright violation than other developed markets. Far less.
Hell, less than five years ago here you had a significant percentage of the online population in the states copying music left and right with no clue that it was even illegal, much less wonder about the morality of it. You still see that defense come up from time to time, too.
And MS expects some preteen in Singapore to know better? Good luck with that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Which only has one version and a single standardized desktop environment. Clearly multiple versions of the same OS are bad.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
Microsoft is finally getting hip to the Pokemon/Magic card phenomenon- only about 12 years late. Features will be sold in randomized booster packs with commons like "Borked Registry", and rares like "Uptime: all day".
> It was limited to 800 x 600 resolution, classic mode only - no theming, only three applications running, and a network restricted to an internet connection, not home networking.
Ouch! Why would anyone bother with it?...You really have to wonder what idiots at Microsoft think this stuff up? Presumably some idiot proposed crippling it to absurdity as "a way to combat piracy" and the co-idiots in the room nodded enthusiastically: "Hey! That'll work."
That's because it was never actually intended to reduce piracy or to be actually used in said developing countries. It was simply meant to placate politicians' voter-bases while giving the politicians a convenient reason to put more pressure on poor developing nations to adhere to US and international IP laws and cough up more cash. (Thereby also helping to keep them "poor" and "developing".)
By offering this crippled nearly-useless piece of crap they could then say to the politicians;
"Hey look! See!? We even went to the trouble to create a low-cost OS *just* for them, and they still pirate our "IP"! Sanction 'em and maybe threaten to stop humanitarian food shipments too, as they're clearly lawless IP pirates with no respect for the rule of law because they refuse to stop their "theft" and switch to paying for the privilege of using this crippled, all-but-useless (P)OS! They're practically terrorists!"
So then they can co-opt the might of the US government to help them enforce their marketing strategies and price structures around the world.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
There still is a high percentage of people in the States copying music left and right - who don't give a c**p about copyright. Nor should they. "Piracy" isn't immoral...copyright is.
There is nothing inherently wrong with copyright. It's actually a great idea. Protect the creator of a good with an exclusive right so they can make their money off of it.
What's immoral is what has been done to that original great idea.
Now it's large record companies that hold the copyrights on the works its represented artists have created. They get a percentage which is determined by a cartel. And copyright has been extended by such insane lengths as to create a revenue stream for those companies that will typically last longer than the artist will live.
And they pay the artist pennies on the dollar. IMHO, that's why people pirate music. They know that 99% of that $15 they just plunked down on a CD will wind up in some corporate jackoff's wallet. The artist you actually like will probably get a thin nickel from your cash. So why bother?
What we need is copyright reform. If the artist got a fair percentage of the sale, and these useless bags of skin that sit between me and them were somehow cut out of the picture, I'd start buying music again.
Disclaimer: I don't buy music, but I don't copy it either. I simply do with what I already own until such time as the marketplace will allow me to buy directly from the artists I like without giving a penny to organizations like the RIAA. Soon as they die, I become a customer again.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Even if you shell out some bucks, their os is still worthless. Case in point:
Go out an grab a copy windows server 2k3, enterprise edition. Sounds like it is just like the ship, right? Tons of phasers, holodecks, and fun toys. It will have everything you need.
Set it up as an application server, and see how many connections they allow. You have to buy a friggen extra license if you want to say set it up to allow more than a couple of people to log on. AND...you have to install a special service somewhere on the network to manage it.
Just think of that: it actually takes writing extra code once you set up the service protocols to limit the number of connections, and make sure that you aren't exceeding the number of connections you have paid for. They paid programmers to limit the number of connections that the OS would allow, to make more money off licenses. If I set up a Linux server, I could open connections (for free) until my RAM exploded.
Even when you try to play the game their way, and buy the biggest, most expensive OS on the shelf, they will still try to fuck you over with an incomplete product.
Go read my old posts. I am generally easy going in regards to MS overall, and I will not advise anyone to buy their operating systems. They are utter garbage.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
With all the time spent dealing with the licensing, a company could probably save money if Microsoft had a 'dumptruck licensing plan' where you simply drove them a dump truck full of money every 6 months and you could use whatever software in whatever situation.
This does actually exist, although not quite in the terms you describe, as the enterprise licensing agreement.
The investment bank I recently worked for paid MS a fixed amount per "seat" per year, which gave them carte blanche to deploy as much end-user and server software (Office, Server OS, MS-SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint, Virtual Server, HyperVisor and so forth) as they wanted.
Developers are handled in a similar fashion - you pay x per developer, and that gives you MSDN access, all the dev tools, documentation, and support.
In passing, this is why VMWare ended up making their server editions no-cost - any company on the enterprise deal gets as much virtualisation as they want for effectively free... the VMWare reps would turn up and ask what it would take for us to use their product in our server consolidation projects, and the answer was always "be the same price..."
This sig left unintentionally blank.
The various flavours of desktop Windows are PURELY a marketing concept and have no basis in customer needs.
Uh, market segmentation is pretty basic economics and common practice. See, for example, any car manufacturer charging $500 for a GPS unit or stereo when equivalent (if not better) models be bought off the shelf for 1/4 the price (but won't be quite as "integrated").
Heck, even Red Hat does it. They have at least 3 different licensing tiers. Any company that can do this, will do it, because they'd be stupid not to.
The idea that consumers would specially pick out Microsoft for criticism, when basically everyone does it, is laughable.
The difference is that a Workstation Linux is preconfigured for a workstation but is otherwise the same as the server edition and both can be turned into the other one ... it is just a convenience and many simply ask which do you want to install and actually install the same system but with configuration changes and a different list of installed components (there is nothing stopping you turning a workstation into a server of vice-versa)
The RedHat systems are actually different levels of support as well as different pre-configured systems - what you are actually paying for is the support not the system (i.e. you actually get a real benefit by paying more)
Windows flavours are purely marketing and are there so some flavours can be sold more cheaply than others, they cost the same to design, build market and sell but the more complete systems can be sold for more
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
The RedHat systems are actually different levels of support as well as different pre-configured systems - what you are actually paying for is the support not the system (i.e. you actually get a real benefit by paying more)
Right. So you pay more and get more... just like the different versions of Windows.
Windows flavours are purely marketing and are there so some flavours can be sold more cheaply than others, they cost the same to design, build market and sell but the more complete systems can be sold for more
Given that the different versions of Windows come with different features, it's quite arguable from a conceptual point of view that they cost more (or less) to "design", depending on how you want to measure.
It's ultimately moot, however. The important point is that there's nothing unusual, special, or different whatsoever about a manufacturer targeting different price points with products that just variations on a theme. Anyone who's ever gone car shopping, will not be surprised that there are different versions of Windows with different features at different price points.
I am not saying this doesn't happen in other business, but it is a bad practice nonetheless. It is akin to Intel disabling the FPU in 486 CPUs and selling them as a 486SX. If you want a car analogy, it would be like a Corvette that has it speed capped to 50 mph. The actual cost of producing the car is the same.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
I am not saying this doesn't happen in other business, but it is a bad practice nonetheless.
Why ?
Person X wants feature A and is prepared to pay price P.
Person Y wants feature A and B and is prepared to pay price 1.5P.
Person Z wants feature A, B and C and is prepared to pay price 2P.
Company Q can take a single product, and with minor changes, deliver A, B and C. The company maximises their revenue and minimises their costs. The customer gets the features they want, at the price point they were prepared to pay and a perception they aren't paying for features they don't need (which cost more). Everybody is happy (or as happy as they're going to get).
It's a textbook example of capitalism and the free market, which is why it's so common.
Why? Because the product being sold already has features A, B and C. In fact, as someone pointed out, there is a cost of disabling the feature, so the version with only feature A should be more expensive. So in fact you are telling your costumers - or the ones who can think anyway - they're idiots.
Secondly, it is not as easy as saying person X wants feature A and is prepared to pay price P. Things are much more complicated than that: people have usually a general set of expectations of what they want in a product - specially one as complicated as an OS -and the value they should pay for it. There is a marketing effort to convince people their expectations will be met by a product only with feature A, or perhaps the most complete with features B and C, and it is worth of paying whatever price they ask for it.
To cap it all, free market and MS don't go very well in the same post. MS have a lot of control over what they put down their costumers throat, since they have a monopoly. The real problem with free market is that it is a fictional, theoretical construct. The real market is usually nowhere like that, and people should know the difference.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?