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Comment by sj4nz | Hacker News Reader

Nine different products = massive confusion for users. Apple certainly made more money when they simplified their computer offerings so that users didn't have to do extreme mental exercises to compare features and buy.

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Is it going to be that confusing? Most people have their choice made for them by their PC manufacturer which is usually the home version unless their IT department specifies something else.

Most of these editions won't be widely available on the shops either I bet, there will be specific versions for enterprise users or for ARM etc. The real choice will come down to 2 versions (or so) as it has with win7.

If you are buying the OS itself as an upgrade then it is probably because you want specific features and your going to want to be able to choose the edition you have.

>Most people have their choice made for them by their PC manufacturer //

It's a up-sell opportunity for PC sales staff too - people see the bottom price based on the MS Windows with all the decent functions removed. The sales staff will tell them they need to have MS Windows 8 Super-non-breaking-hacker-resistant-anti-mildew Edition instead ... oh and by the way now you've settled on that you'll need extra RAM otherwise it will run slow as anything.

The lack of knowledge about the different editions basically cripples a regular buyer's ability to decide for themselves.

I've never seen sales staff try and upsell a Windows edition to someone who didn't need it (in the UK at least), not saying it doesn't happen of course and if your running a non server version are the hardware requirements any different?

AFAIK the only reason you'd need something other than Win7 Home is if you want to connect to an AD network or have legacy software you need to run.

You get features like encrypted folders etc in other versions but this can easily be replicated for free with software like truecrypt.

There is no perfectly generalisable strategy. Simplify or die works for Apple, but it assumes you know exactly what the customer wants and are willing to have those you guessed wrong for walk away.

Tim Cook used to hand out Competing Against Time, which advocates reducing cycle time to increase variety (Apple tweaks this to variety over time, i.e. rapid development).

I agree, however, that consumers should have one version that smartly configures itself. Keep price discrimination for corporate/enterprise customers.

Not really. They segment the market pretty well, and few people buy the retail box and have to think about this stuff. Basically, it's cheap PC, or PC that does video for consumers.

The key difference is Apple has "computer offerings". Microsoft doesn't. With my enterprise hat on, I don't want to pay for video editors, etc. Likewise, the parent buying a laptop for a child doesn't want to pay for full disk encryption that is FIPS compliant.

There's absolutely no need for so many Windows versions. I don't care what their argument is, neither manufacturers nor consumers need that many versions to choose from. This is just Microsoft's way of nickle and diming their customers, even though I doubt they'll even have success in doing that.

> neither manufacturers nor consumers need that many versions to choose from

And they don't.

> This is just Microsoft's way of nickle and diming their customers

No, it's not. Did you even look at the different versions? Eval versions? Prerelease Editions? Enterprise editions?

You'll see three on the shelf: Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. The confusion is made up.

Amongst those editions: PreRelease Edition. Enterprise Eval Edition. Prerelease Arm Edition. Users won't be confused. They will buy their computer, and use what it comes with. They'll go to the store, and they'll have 3 editions: Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. And most people won't even bother buying it, they'll just buy a computer and use what comes with that.

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