Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise
When it released Windows Vista two years ago, Microsoft took some lumps from critics and competitors for offering six versions of its latest operating system. So how many versions of its successor to Vista – Windows 7 – will Microsoft offer?
Once again, six is the magic number.
In a Q&A that Microsoft posted on its site Tuesday, Windows general manager Mike Ybarra said the different flavors of Windows 7 will include Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise. Microsoft made only small changes to its naming scheme, chucking out a “business” version of Vista in favor of a “professional” version of Windows 7, for instance…
A company spokeswoman says PC makers will conceivably be able to install as many as four out of the six versions of Windows 7 on their computers. Some of the differences between the various flavors are huge…
It isn’t clear whether the company is intentionally crippling Windows 7 Starter to give consumers an incentive to buy machines with higher-end versions of the software. Netbooks are widely seen as a potential threat to Microsoft’s business if they start to cannibalize sales of more expensive, full featured machines. At the moment, most netbooks come with Microsoft’s older Windows XP operating system, which it plans to stop selling by the end of next June (or one year after Windows 7 goes on sale, whichever is later).
In other words, Microsoft hasn’t a clue.
#34,
Oh come on, its funny, thats why I been trolling them along all day long.
People being absurd is funny!
#36
“MS WAS a good company (softwarewise, don’t mix corporate behaviour here). Stopped being so around 2000 and something”
Meh, I think Microsoft’s big problem has been all the antitrust crap thrown at them. The EU and other governments trying to extort them for including basic functionality (media center/internet explorer) in their products has to be putting a damper on innovation. They need to grow a pair and tell them to go shove it.
I thought Vista ended up being a good OS overall. It’s fast, stable, and secure, it just didn’t add any really exciting new features.
To many flavors and with some of them crippled? Which is better a non crippled ubuntu or a crippled windows 7?
If windows 7 light isn’t crippled then I don’t want the heavy.
To a degree MS is out of their minds at the top.
# 38 deowll said, “Which is better a non crippled ubuntu or a crippled windows 7? ”
For grandma? Windows.
Everyone knows that Windoz will give you ‘brain cancer’ while you stare at the screen waiting for it to boot!
See you at the cancer center! I’ll bring you some nice herbal tea
Windows 7 “Starter”? Is that anything like sour dough starter? You mix a little bit of Win7 into WinXP, and it eventually sours the whole OS?
“Home Basic” & “Home Premium”? Oh come on! So one comes with the Win Pic viewer, and one doesn’t, right? Or is WMP11 missing from Home Basic? “Professional” replaced Vista’s “Business” label. Yeah, because it probably confused those business executives, who went for that instead of the Enterprise version. So Microsoft fell back to XP’s “Pro” label. Which they can claim is for serious artists and such.
“Ultimate” and “Enterprise” are probably 99.9% the same as the Professional version, but with different levels of a service plan. “Ultimate” means you speak to a dude in India. While with “Enterprise” you speak to either an American dude or Commander Spock.
Windows consumers managed to deal with the two flavors of XP, over the years. Mainly it’s a matter of the price. The XP “Pro” advantages were probably over their heads. Then Microsoft’s marketing geniuses came out with six flavors of Vista (1 short of 7, to avoid any “Seven Dwarfs” jokes). And most users found the choices far too perplexing. So rather than simplifying Win7 down to three. They repeated Vista’s six versions.
But you can bet that the box makers will offer only three at most. And 99.9% of consumers won’t give a hoot about the top two (U&E) or the very bottom version. So the middle three it is.
“Starter” is probably what Microsoft hopes to distribute to natural disaster sites, or Special Ed schools, on refurbed PCs. And get a tax break for donating a full OS.
“20 Linuxes to the Dwarves that live in caves, 6 Windows to the Kings of Men, and One OSX to rule them all…”
Unix can be the Three given to the Elves…
(Solaris, Hp-Ux and AIX).
FYI, MacOs is FreeBSD based, a Unix variant.
And also it used to be 11 Linuxes to the Dwarves, but somehow they dug up some more flavours of Linux in the mean time…
@45
“Face it, Microsoft built an empire during the Eigthties and Nineties out of products that were inferior to the latest Linux releases”
OK. But, don’t know if you noticed, it’s 2009. 15 years have gone by…
As Much as I disagree with the principle I agree with paddy-o’s facts in #39.
Give stupid users the choice between a broken Windows OS (Vista until recently) and Linux. They pick pick windows every time because of familiarity. It is what it is, there’s lots of Different Reasons but MS has an OS monopoly.
# 47 Breetai said, “It is what it is, there’s lots of Different Reasons but MS has an OS monopoly.”
I’ve always wondered why Apple didn’t & doesn’t want to make bigger inroads into that market.
@48
Because Apple sells to a Premium Market.
They’ll never be on a NetBook (They might do one but it will sell at $599), they’ll never be bundled with a Dell or an HP…
They are extremely comfortable where they are.
# 49 JoaoPT said, “they’ll never be bundled with a Dell or an HP… They are extremely comfortable where they are.”
Right, thus there is no PC OS monopoly, only a market others don’t see as profitable enough to play in.
#48 Paddy-O
PC’s are a commodity market in the Windows world. Basically a throw away item. When Jobs came back he moved directly away from that market to the premium world and is using the Apple brand name to grow above and beyond the PC.
Apple is now the biggest music seller in the US with nothing but digital inventory. They have changed the mobile market with a cool phone but more importantly with the app store.
Apps, not the OS, built Microsoft’s monopoly. Apple learned that and is doing the same with phones.
They’ve failed in trying to deliver video media (aka Apple TV). That’s there next “innovation”.