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Comment by latortuga | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

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

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