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Comment by acangiano | Hacker News Reader

As I commented a few days ago, Microsoft hasn't learned much from the Vista fiasco. Just deliver two versions already: a home one and a professional one. The Pro one would cost slightly more and offer more advanced features that the (average) home user won't care about. Limiting the number of applications you can run is an idiotic move. Foolish. There is no other way to put it, netbook with limited resources or not. If they want to create a Windows 7 Netbook Edition, they should focus on reducing the OS footprint, not imposing limits on what their users can do.

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You may be right in saying they haven't learned much from Vista, but I think your 'just have two versions' argument is overly simplistic.

Today MSFT sells Windows Home/HP for $x to lots of OEMs, who don't like paying that price, but don't have much choice, as their users 'want' Windows (want='think they want, because they dont know anything else'). OEMs say to MSFT 'we wont pay $x for Windows on netbooks, it's too expensive, sell it to us for $y'. But if MSFT sells Windows for $y for any PC then they lose $(x-y).(# of non netbook PCs), which would massively hit their share price TODAY. They can't do that, so even though they know that one day they will have to give up the $x price they do what they can to keep that price as long as possible (aka cash-cows are for milking, not slaughtering). So they invent a new product, that no self respecting OEM would sell on a decent PC, slap a $y price tag on it, and say to the netbook buyers, 'there you go, a version of windows for $y', while they keep selling the main version for $x. The fact that that version sucks is painful for MSFT, but not as painful as selling all Windows for $y for all PCs, nor as painful as being seen to do nothing in the netbook market.

Summary: this isnt about MSFT being dumb, its about MSFT keeping their cash-cow alive so that the share-holders don't slaughter them today, even if it may be bad for long-term (~5 years) shareholder value. (x >> y)

Why would shareholders suddenly jump ship if MS came up with a price for Windows that kept them on netbooks? Wouldn't shareholders be more scared of the prospect of seeing netbooks switch away from Windows en masse? And why would setting OEM netbook pricing to a specific value imply a loss on non-netbook pcs? It's not like they'd be dumb enough to set price $y without a contract forbidding the manufacturer from dropping it on anything other than a netbook.

Don't let me put words in other mouths, but the reason tomsaffell is saying that if MS sells a $y-priced version of Windows for netbooks that they'll end up losing $(x-y)(# of non-netbook PCs) is this: if there is a fully-functional* Windows version on the market then all contemporary Windows versions will tend to that price. Users will say "why do I pay $x for Windows when John Q. Otherguy got it for $y on his netbook?".

The only way that users won't say that is if the "Windows for Netbooks" is lousy in some way or another.

*(Means something like "works the same, except for feature Z" where Z is sufficiently obscure)

Most users have no idea how much of their PC purchase went towards a Windows license.

Users don't know how much OEMs pay for the copy of Windows that's on their machines. MS just simply wouldn't sell it to end users at that price, just like they don't sell regular Windows to end users at OEM prices now.

The problem is that if there is this cheaper version for netbooks that's good enough, OEMs will just buy that and put it on all their boxes.

And then they would be sued. That's what contracts are for.

> It's not like they'd be dumb enough to set price $y without a contract forbidding the manufacturer from dropping it on anything other than a netbook.

I'm no lawyer, so I'd love to have a lawyer wade in on this. But seeing as you asked, I'll take a stab: such a contract could be perceived as being anti-competitive, and MSFT are super sensitive to being perceived to be anti-competitive. A product that is demonstrably less good can be sold for less. But to sell the identical product at two different price points to the same company, that sounds to me (as a consumer) unfair, and anti-competition law is intended ultimately to protect consumers. (aside: MSFT had a nice solution before Win7: keep selling XP under certain netbook restrictions because it is a different product to vista, and a product that is better for netbooks/ULCPCs (and a liked product). I'm guessing they wont have as much luck selling Vista on special netbook /ULCPC only terms once Win 7 is out.. )

Um, they already have variable pricing for XP on netbooks.

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=23795 http://www.crn.com/software/212902058

(not the best sources, but they were the first hits. wsj reported it, too)

Tiered pricing is not seen as bad as it once was. Bill Gates is currently promoting it as an international development tool. I'm not sure what the laws are (or will be), but I think there could be work-arounds.

I guess that the answer to your first question relates to how much faith shareholders have in those contracts as a way to keep the average cost of Windows high. Milking a cash cow is not a win-lose, binary process. It is a matter of how much & how long. Tiered pricing would make me edgy.

The answer to your second question is lack of competitive pressure. Windows isn't ideal for netbooks. When they came out first, Linux looked like it might win. But it didn't. They kept netbooks windows. They did this without a fight, without a netbook strategy.

At this point, there are no new competitors & no problematic trend. They now have a netbook strategy. Flawed or not, this is better then no strategy. Why should shareholders be worried.

I disagree with you for the same reason that Apple doesn't allow their OS to run on any hardware but their own. It's a user experience decision. I'm willing to believe that Microsoft put plenty of testing into Windows 7 on suboptimal hardware and determined that performance suffers with more than 3 applications open. I can't cite it at the moment but recall the Google study that compared user satisfaction with response time versus number of results. If it's significantly slower, users will be more unhappy with it and will probably blame Windows and not their applications or hardware, regardless of the reason (this is conjecture, I'll admit, but conjecture based on personal experience with people who blindly hate Windows).

In the end, if they limit the number of open programs to three, it's very possible that users will look more favorably upon the performance/stability of Windows 7.

Your point makes sense, but but I suspect that if they were doing it for that reason the number of allowed processes would depend on the machine and configuration.

They can do variable configuration for a wide range of machines, or they can create a static configuration for a narrow range of machines. They've done the latter.

They can do it dynamically, which is what I would think they would do if they had user experience as their motivation.

> In the end, if they limit the number of open programs to three, it's very possible that users will look more favorably upon the performance/stability of Windows 7.

Why not just limit it to zero? If you don't run anything, it doesn't crash. But all it takes is one buggy piece of software to bring the whole thing down. I don't think reducing the load would help anything. IE7 with a bunch of tabs open can sometimes consume almost 1.5GB of memory...

I can't tell if this is flamebait but I'll bite. Limiting to a small number has the effect of minimizing the probability of performance problems from running out of memory and thereby improving user experience. Limiting to zero obviously makes it unusable.

I see power users being a lot more upset about this limitation than, for example, my mother who uses her PC for email, internet, and word docs. I also think Microsoft has done a poor job in explaining themselves on this change but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

>> "Limiting to a small number has the effect of minimizing the probability of performance problems from running out of memory and thereby improving user experience."

I don't buy that at all. One bad program can still eat all the memory. The number of apps has little real bearing on anything. It just makes ms look like fools.

I don't work for them, I'm not trying to feed you a line. I'm just trying to see it from their perspective. I'm not presenting facts, merely ideas.

It's a user experience decision

Maybe, but if so it's a bad branding decision.

The problem is not only that the "improved user experience" looks too much like "deliberate crippling". It's also that they use the same name for the crippled version. They will be derided for that, and that bad PR is going to carry over to the entire Windows 7 brand. What are they thinking?

Apple put a Mac OS with a "different user experience" on the iPhone. But they didn't advertise that to anyone but developers. The word "Mac" is not mentioned in connection with the phone. The iPhone has a really different user experience -- it's not just the Mac OS on slow hardware with a one-app-at-once limitation, it's a whole different universe. And it is very deliberately branded, not as a very small, kind of slow portable computer with no keyboard, but as the world's best phone.

This is exactly right... MS is marketing it as windows 7 srtarter.. Should be windows notebook 1.0, hey 2.0 will come out at same time as windows 8. Cool. Even nicer if they changed the interface so the "netbook" feels like a netbook with a different ui and so on. This way nobody feels like they got the crummy windows and ms is milking em, they just got something different... And ms gets to sell dumbed down oses. Windows 7 just aint compatable with your pos notebook. Ok get windows notebook 1.0.

I still feel that selling a crippled os like xp vs xp pro is just plain ol evil... Vista is worse and no lessob learned

I still feel that selling a crippled os like xp vs xp pro is just plain ol evil... Vista is worse

And that's another reason why this is a bad move: Microsoft has a history of this sort of thing -- their confusing product lineup has been the butt of jokes for years -- so the negative stories just write themselves.

Yes, I believe I was hinting that Microsoft should have released the netbook version of Win7 under another name. But then there's a different problem: It may be a bit late to introduce Windows Netbook 1.0, because they've already shipped thousands of netbooks with full-blown XP running on them. It's not a secret that you can run XP on a netbook. Are people going to trade "up" to Netbook 1.0 from XP? Only if it's actually better -- it's not enough just to change the name.

Once again, we see that one of Microsoft's most serious competitors is itself from ten years ago. I guess there are worse problems to have in the short run, but it's a serious problem when you're trying to move forward.

But it was never the number of "open programs" that brought people's windows systems to a crawl -- it was always horribly written services: virus scanners, preloaders, viruses, etc.

Windows 7 Starter Edition does not in any way limit the number of Windows Services you can have running!

I'm not sure this makes sense. 1 heavyweight application can easily consume more juice than 10 lightweight ones.

Why would MS put even more resources into an OS that they're selling for less than the full versions? The app limit is probably very easy to implement and therefore doesn't cost a ton, thereby allowing them to license the starter version for cheap.

I do agree however that an app limit is silly, however I can't see MS doing a 'Firefox' project to create a lean version of Windows that they'd sell cheap. Doesn't make business sense.

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