There seems to be much yelling and wringing of hands over the announced editions of Windows 7 today. “There’s SIX versions! Horrifying! Consumers’ brains will melt!” At first glance, it does look ridiculous:
- Windows 7 Starter
- Windows 7 Home Basic
- Windows 7 Home Premium
- Windows 7 Professional
- Windows 7 Enterprise
- Windows 7 Ultimate
Thing is, not one person looking at buying Windows 7 will be making their choice from six options. The truly relevant list is the answer to “What will Joe Consumer see on the shelf at Best Buy if he’s thinking about upgrading?”
- Windows 7 Home Premium
- Windows 7 Professional
Just like XP, in other words. The Home/Professional split worked out more or less alright in that case, although if you ask me, they chose a pretty stupid set of features to excise from XP Home. In this case, Win7 Pro will add filesystem encryption, the ability to join a Windows domain, network-based backup, the ability to RDC to the box, group policy capabilities, and so on. Not a bad feature set for a geek/poweruser, especially if you’ve got a home server.
And what about all the other editions? Starter and Home Basic are “for emerging markets” and won’t be sold in the U.S. Enterprise is self-explanatory. So far, the only information I can find on Ultimate vs. Professional is that it adds BitLocker driver encryption. Whoopee. It’ll also apparently have a small footprint, probably not even available on brick-and-mortar retailers’ shelves, since Microsoft is well aware that pretty much the whole Windows-using community except for a sliver of PC enthusiasts laughed in their face at the sky-high price for Vista Ultimate.
As a gamer and a web geek who uses Photoshop CS4 64-bit on a regular basis, I’m essentially locked in to Windows, for better or for worse. Truth is, Win7 looks like the upgrade Vista ought to have been. I’m digging the new taskbar, the peek feature, and other improvements—video demonstrations are all over the web by now if you haven’t installed the beta and seen for yourself. For actually pushing the OS forward with fresh ideas, and putting more effort into fixing the features that Vista introduced and botched, this is a release that deserves to be supported. (In contrast, when Vista came out, the only reason to upgrade that mattered to me was the promise of games that would take advantage of my new DirectX 10 hardware—and then the games never materialized with a noticeable difference between DX9 and DX10 graphics.) I just cringe a little at the prospect of buying Windows again so soon. Gizmodo has a great point here: let me send you proof of my Vista Certificate of Authenticity/product key, and send me back a coupon or mail-in rebate on Windows 7. It’d garner huge respect from customers who are really down on Microsoft and Windows after the last few years’ debacle.
