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HPsquared

The home versions being "untrustworthy" also could help push sales of the business version.

Especially with things being done more in the browser, the "business features" of the OS are less of a draw.

So they need to instead put anti-features in the home version to deter business users from "cheaping out".

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>The home versions being "untrustworthy" also could help push sales of the business version.

How so? Consumers don't have easy access to the Business version AFAIK, and businesses will always buy the Business version anyway.

Consumers can easily get the Pro edition instead of Home. There used to be even a update purchase link in some control.exe applet.

It is the Enterprise and LTSC editions, that consumers do not have access to. But for the purposes above, Pro is enough (and most popular in business).

Pro edition is not the same as business edition, it's still consumer edition with same dark patterns.

There's no business edition.

There's Home, Pro, Enterprise (E3, E5); with variants for N (no media) and Education. That's it.

Enterprise doesn't have Appstore crap preinstalled, and has some features that you wouldn't want at home anyway (it is enteprise-oriented crap instead). Not every business runs Enterprise edition.

They name install media accordingly - if you have access to MVS or VLSC you can check it yourself.

Consumer includes Home and Pro.

Business includes Pro, Education, Pro for Workstations (which is Pro without dark patterns even when not domain joined) and Enterprise.

These ISOs also usually include all N variants.

There is a large segment of crossover where small non-IT centric companies will run it on whatever was on sale at their local reseller and a couple of Cloud services for CRM and accounting and no IT staff/policy.

For those to sign up with a Microsoft partner and buy into the full packet could be an significant market, Though it could end up a net loss for MS if this segment start to go Chromebook in a major way the way a lot of school districts did.

>There is a large segment of crossover where small non-IT centric companies will run it on whatever was on sale at their local reseller and a couple of Cloud services for CRM and accounting and no IT staff/policy.

Sure, but even small businesses get Office 365 nowadays and that automatically unlocks your home/pro edition of Windows into a business one, the movement you sign in with your company Office 365 account.

If you go for Google Workspaces instead of Office 365 then that's another matter entirely.

I think your making the assumption that business user means someone sitting st a desk with a PC writing letters in word or doing calculations in excel and not someone with a shovel doing gardening or driving a van around.

For the average small business the only thing they cant do on their smartphone is file their taxes or interact with whatever bookkeeping/banking system their accountant ashed them to use. And the only applications they have is whatever came preinstalled on the acer laptop they bought from the local big box store.

For MS and their partners the goal is to actually sign them up with an business account through an MSP, which might not be the rational thing for any small service sector business to do as there is nothing in the o365 that will aid them in performing the services they sell to their customers.

For retail sales, this is only true for "Pro for Workstations", and that is mostly sold on ReFS.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/business/compare-win...

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