Average User Only Runs 2 Apps, So Microsoft Will Charge For More

Barence writes "Microsoft's decision to limit Windows 7 Starter Edition to running only three concurrent applications could force up the price of netbooks as many manufacturers opt for the more expensive Home Premium. The three-app rule includes applications running in the background but excludes antivirus, and the company claims most users wouldn't be affected by the limit. 'We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time]. We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn't affect very many people.' However, Microsoft told journalists at last year's Professional Developers Conference that 70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time."

Comments

What's an 'application' to a user?

[onion2k]

id they explain to the users what "an application" is? I'm sure a quick straw poll around non-IT guys in my office asking "How many things are you running?" would result in a similar number, but then if I explained that "the internet" is a browser application, that "listening to my music" is a media player app, that "getting my email" is a mail client, and so on would bump the number up to a couple of visible apps like Word and Excel plus a futher three or four concurrent applications that are essentially invisible.

Another effect could also be to drive the usage of things like Google Docs further in the home marketplace. If you can't run Word but you can run a browser it'd make much more sense to use a browser based application.

Mind you, this could have an 'unexpected' benefit. Anyone running a bot would find they can't open a browser or play music or something. People would have a good incentive to make sure their PC is only running what it should be running.

DoS

[Shikaku]

What if you get a virus? Oops it opens notepad and wordpad and now you can't run anything.

Hell, what about just running Antivirus? This is completely outrageous.

Re:Just reset your clock

[cbiltcliffe]

Not 3.1

3.11 for Workgroups.

Built in standard networking, and it was actually pretty darned stable, even running a few apps at once. Or at least, in my experience it was.

Crippled like XP Home

[tenco]

I had to use a XP Home edition on a laptop that wouldn't run Linux/*BSD without pains 2-3 years ago. (That XP came preinstalled with the laptop accompanied by a rescue CD that extracted an image into a partition. This would result in a XP installation with lots of other crap preinstalled.)

So I first got my backups (as administrator of course) unpacked onto the XP Home box and tried to change the permissions on that backup so that it could be accessed by an account with normal user privileges. It took me nearly half an hour to realize that XP Home doesn't let you change permissions on files. Another half one to find the way Microsoft thinks this should work (Copying into a folder called sth like public documents or so. Hardrive was 80GB large and I had ~60GB of backups.). I finally found a HOWTO on the net for making a XP Professional (nearly feature complete) out of my Home edition and an installation CD using BartPE.

Result: even XP has editions which are crippled beyond being useful. This is hardly news.

Re:Just reset your clock

[cayenne8]

Ah...I remember the early days of my introduction to the 'internet'.

I found a local dial up isp....I found Trumpet Winsock for windows...got that installed, then learned command line ftp, to get this cool new browser I'd seen at school, "Netscape 1.0".

Wow...was that ever fun. Then came the exciting times when I could actually find a friend of mine that also knew what the 'internet' was...and had a working email address!!