I’ve been following the Engineering Windows 7 blog closely and I’ve come to the conclusion that while Steven Sinofsky is a man of many words, those words don’t say an awful lot. However, the other day Sinofsky did say something quite interesting:
We heard lots on this forum about providing specific versions of Windows customized for different audiences, while we also heard quite a bit about the need to reduce the number of versions of Windows. However, there are limits to what we can provide and at the same time provide a reliable “platform” that customers and developers can count on and is robust and manageable for a broad set of customers. [emphasis added]
This is the trap that Windows Vista fell into, thanks to marketing. Here you have an OS that comes in four retail flavors (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate), but the differences between these editions comes down to little more than arbitrary decisions made for the sake of marketing and being able to sell existing users an upgrade. For example, someone made the decision that home users were idiots and wouldn’t want a complete backup and restore feature, and that business users wouldn’t want to make DVDs. Given this, and what Sinofsky says about needing to provide a reliable platform, I really can’t understand how the Vista experience ended up being smeared over four editions.
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