Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

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mechanical_fish

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.

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