Microsoft has finally decided to reveal Eight windows vista editions. Six of which comprise of the core Vista versions and Two additional releases customized for the European Union that won't bundle in Windows Media Player.
The news of the SKUs can be found on the beta pages of Windows Vista Help.
Six core versions :
[*]Windows Starter 2007
[*]Windows Vista Home Basic
[*]Windows Vista Home Premium
[*]Windows Vista Business
[*]Windows Vista Ultimate
[*]Windows Vista Enterprise
[*]Windows Vista Business N
[*]Windows Vista Home Basic N
Missing :
- Standalone Tablet and Media Center Editions are no more.
- No Windows Vista Small Business Edition on the current list.
- No mention of any 64-bit-specific Windows Vista editions on the Microsoft Web site.
All of the planned Windows variants will include integrated games. The Vista Business, Home and Enterprise editions all will include built-in support for mobile.
It's not clear whether the Starter release mentioned on Microsoft's site is the same as the current Windows XP Starter Edition product, which is a cut-rate, less fully featured version of Windows tailored for developing countries.
The new SKU list contains relatively few surprises, as Microsoft had been widely expected to fold features from its current Windows XP Media Center Edition and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition into other SKUs, rather than continue to sell them as distinct editions.
Microsoft officials did not respond by the time this article was posted to questions as to whether the latest line-up list reflects all of the planned Windows Vista versions.
Current XP versions :
Microsoft currently offers six different versions of Windows XP. The line up includes XP Home, Professional, Media Center, Tablet PC, and Professional x64, and the Windows XP N editions.
[break=Microsoft boxes up Vista]
Microsoft boxes up Vista
All the flavours of Vista will be able to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode, with the exception of Starter, which will be 32-bit only.
Here's how the Vista packages stack up:
- Windows Vista Business includes similar features to today's Windows XP Professional edition, including backup, networking, and group policy support. It includes Microsoft's new Aero user interface, a new search engine, and small-business features such as fax and scanning software and easier-to-understand help menus.
- Windows Vista Enterprise, available to Microsoft's largest corporate customers, adds new BitLocker hard-drive encryption, a virtual PC program for running software written for other platforms, and a new subsystem for running Unix apps.
- Windows Vista Home Premium is designed for the majority of home PC users and includes the ability to show photos on a large-screen TV, play music on a home stereo, write and copy DVDs, and edit high-definition video. It also includes the ability to sync files between two computers.
- Windows Vista Ultimate combines all the features of the Vista Business and Home Premium editions -- it's designed for corporate employees who often work on company projects from home.
- Windows Vista Home Basic is aimed at users who mainly read and send E-mail and surf the Web. It doesn't include the Tablet PC, Media Center, photography and music software in Vista Home Premium.
- Windows Vista Starter will retail only in emerging markets such as India, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, and Indonesia. It won't be available in the United States or Europe, and runs only in 32-bit mode.
[break=Instant Windows Vista upgrades are on the way]
Instant Windows Vista upgrades are on the way
Today at Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report on ZDNet, I listed some of the upgrade scenarios that will be possible when Windows Vista ships. All three consumer versions - Home Basic, Home Premium, and Ultimate - will be included on the same CD or DVD. You don’t need to go to the store and purchase a new shrink-wrapped box to upgrade; all you have to do is go to Control Panel and run the Windows Anytime Upgrade program.
I’ve just installed Windows Home Basic on a test computer here and snapped some screen shots to show what the process looks like. Here’s the opening screen :
When you click past this introduction, you get to the step-by-step upgrade path shown here :
Note the text in step 1, which makes it very clear that you’re about to go to “one of our partner’s websites to purchase a license….†Microsoft clearly has no desire to upset its retail and OEM partners by trying to sell licenses directly to Windows customers. I suspect that in the final release big OEMs like Dell, HP, and Sony will have a custom version of this upgrade utility to send customers back to their website to purchase the upgrade license.
If you try to upgrade using one of the current beta test versions, of course, you get sent to a placeholder page, which contains no pricing or other details.
[break=Microsoft Windows Vista to be launched in November]
Microsoft Windows Vista to be launched in November
This is the year… the year that Microsoft releases the newest version of Windows. Yes, Vista will be released in November of this year.
So what is so compelling that our customers would want to spend money upgrading to the Vista operating system? Let’s take a quick look at all that Vista offers a small business.
Was posted on - The Official Microsoft Connections Blog
[break=Vista Rating System]
Vista Rating System
The "Windows Performance Rating," which can be seen in the latest test version of the operating system, evaluates components such as the processor, the memory, the hard drive and graphics cards to come up with an overall score.
The rating appears in a large blue circle and can be seen in multiple places in the operating system, though Microsoft has said little about what exactly the rating signifies. The main rating is on a scale of 1 to 5, but individual components are also given a "sub rating" on some other, unspecified range.
End user :
"The idea behind the Windows Performance Rating is to help average consumers easily understand their Windows Vista PC's overall performance, and to simplify the process of determining whether certain software applications will run smoothly based on their system components," Microsoft said in a statement.
Computer makers and retailers would then be able to use that as a tool to help explain, in general terms, the capabilities of a particular machine. Software makers would also be able to specify the type of PC needed to run their software.
Example :
A Sony Vaio laptop on display at last week's Intel Developer Forum scored an overall rating of 3. The PC had an Intel processor and 1GB of memory, which earned sub-ratings of 5.6 and 5.5 respectively. A desktop on the IDF show floor with Intel's Pentium D 940 processor and 2GB of unspecified memory also received a 3, with the processor rated at 5.6 and the memory at 5.5.
Issues :
An open question is whether the system rating is a fixed score or whether it might change over time, as hardware advances. There are challenges whichever route Microsoft takes. If adjustments are made, then the rating for a particular setup will decline, and consumers may feel their PC is losing steam. On the other hand, if the ratings don't evolve, improving technology could eventually lead all machines to score a 5.
Microsoft declined to provide details of its rating methodology, noting that it is still working on the grading system.
[break=Vista and the Quest for More Memory]
Vista and the Quest for More Memory
How Vista will affect your next memory purchase...
With Windows Vista’s anticipated launch later this year, a concern on everyone’s mind is how Vista will tax existing PC platforms. Although the new graphical user interface will require DirectX 9 support, and Intel G965 (or better) graphic accelerators, the real question mark in everyone’s minds is where DRAM requirements will head for Windows Vista. Baseline Vista offerings will require 512MB of DRAM just to install, with a 1GB recommendation -- but is there more to this story?
Integrated graphics from ATI, Intel, and NVIDIA all use shared memory architectures. This means that even though the graphics core is on the motherboard Northbridge, the graphics controller accesses memory from the system main memory. Low end, PCIe 3D accelerations from ATI, and NVIDIA also use shared memory support, using in excess of 256MB of system DRAM in exchange for a dirt cheap graphics accelerator. On these systems the Vista recommendation for 512MB is not acceptable as a significant amount of main memory is consumed by the graphics accelerators.
Furthermore, Windows Vista will come with a new feature called Superfetch. With Windows XP, Microsoft included a feature called Prefetch: a dynamic service that preemptively loads files into the pagefile in order to speed up application load time. Superfetch advances further in two steps. Step one is to build profiles of frequently used applications and store those profiles into the pagefile, and system memory. Step two is to pool NAND and all other available memory to move as much of the pagefile as possible off the hard drive and onto the solid state memory. As a result, anyone with a heavy usage profile will have a significant portion of their system memory dedicated to application data.
Vista & DRAM Mfgr's :
At IDF we recently had the opportunity to talk to Tom Trill, Intel’s Director of DRAM Marketing. An interesting point Trill mentioned to us is that system integrators generally spend 6-8% of the system cost on memory. Retail DDR2-667 crossed over into the $80 USD per gigabyte range a few months ago with the price for system integrators hovering around $60. AMD and Intel both have new processors expected to utilize DDR2-800 before the Q4 launch of Windows Vista. By conservative estimates, we can expect to see the average system integrator bundle new computers with 1GB of DDR2-667 by the end of this year.
Samsung’s internal research recently published a figure claiming that the average PC system (including SI, OEM and home built computers) averages 871MB of DRAM in 2005, up from 620MB the year before. The DRAM industry has traditionally seen large growth around the launches of Windows operating system such as Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows XP.
With large growth come large economies of scale, and ultimately lower prices for DRAM are on the horizon. Furthermore, with cheaper DRAM prices, system integrators are free to integrate more memory into the magic 6-8% budget. With such favorable trends, seeing 2GB of memory as a standard in every PC by the end of this year would be of no surprise to us at all.
[break=Final Names for Windows Vista Performance Features]
Final Names for Windows Vista Performance Features
PC Accelerators is the new term that encompasses Windows Vista’s new performance-enhancing technologies.
The Windows PC Accelerators are:
- Windows® SuperFetch
[*]Windows® ReadyBoost(formerly code-named “EMDâ€)
[*]Windows® ReadyDrive(formerly code-named “Pitonâ€)
Windows SuperFetchâ„¢ is a memory management innovation in Windows Vista that helps make your PC consistently responsive by tracking what applications are used most on a given machine and intelligently preloading these applications into memory.
Windows ReadyBoostâ„¢ (formerly code-named “EMDâ€) makes PCs running genuine Windows Vista more responsive by using flash memory on a USB drive, SD Card, Compact Flash, or other memory form factor to boost system performance. Example- Windows ReadyBoostâ„¢ is an easy way to make my computer feel faster. I just put in a USB key and follow the instructions on the screen.
Windows ReadyDriveâ„¢ (formerly code-named “Pitonâ€) enables Windows Vista PCs equipped with a hybrid hard drive to boot up faster, resume from hibernate in less time, and preserve battery power. Hybrid hard drives are a new type of hard disk that integrates non-volatile flash memory with a traditional hard drive.
[break=Vista Gets New App Compatibility Tool]
Vista Gets New App Compatibility Tool
With any major new Windows release such as Vista, application compatibility becomes a critical concern for businesses and individuals considering an upgrade. No matter how much Microsoft promotes the new version, users aren't going to make the switch unless their applications continue to function seamlessly.
In turn, Microsoft has long offered an Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT), which checks what programs are installed on a system and detects any potential conflicts. The Redmond company is preparing version 5 of the software to be ready by the time Windows Vista ships later this year, and has included a number of new features.
ACT 5.0 most notably will have to take into account the limited user privileges in Windows Vista that are designed to keep the operating system core safe from malware. Internet Explorer 7 will also run in a protected mode, potentially disrupting applications that interact with the browser.
Microsoft has also provided a new user interface in ACT version 5.0, which is designed to centrally manage configuring and scheduling compatibility evaluations. A reporting functionality can be used to view problems with updates, applications, systems and even Web sites not working under IE7.
The updated toolkit additionally takes advantage of a "Compatibility Exchange" Web service. IT administrators can share compatibility data with each other via the site, and Microsoft will offer its own Windows Vista test data to customers. The company hopes to eliminate as many headaches as possible by providing such information well in advance of Vista's launch.
A beta version of Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 is currently open for sign-ups via Microsoft Connect. Customers can nominate themselves for the beta test by selecting the appropriate link under "Available Programs."
[break=Vista upgrades may be slowed by graphics]
Vista upgrades may be slowed by graphics
The biggest barrier to users upgrading existing PCs to Windows Vista will be the new operating system's graphics requirements, analysts agree.
"It's very difficult to tell what kind of machine you need to experience the full Aero Glass interface," said Rob Helm, director of research at US-based Directions on Microsoft. "You have to know the video card's memory bandwidth, how much memory is on the card based on the screen size resolution you want to run, and what kind of shader capability your card's chip has."
"This is stuff I just don't want to know," added Michael Cherry, another analyst at Directions. "It's very confusing, and seems to be getting more technical than less technical.
"The number one thing in the way of Vista upgrades is graphics. Video is the real issue," said Cherry.
The graphics brouhaha stems from Vista's new vector-based interface rendering technology, dubbed Aero, which will feature visual extras such as translucent screens, animated program flipping, and icons showing thumbnails of opened files.
Microsoft has designed Aero so that it scales to the graphics capability of the PC. According to information it's released to partners in a Vista Product Guide and posted on its "Vista Capable PC Hardware Guidelines" website, Aero will require a video adapter that supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) video drivers and DirectX 9; it must also have a graphics memory bandwidth of at least 1,800MB per second.
"I know what memory bandwidth is," said Helm, "but I don't know how you would find out what your card has. These requirements will put up some additional barriers that will hang up even sophisticated users."
PCs using a video adapter with WDDM support but missing other requirements - such as the Pixel Shader 2.0 support, for instance - will run a stripped-down interface that looks similar to an updated Windows XP desktop, not the full Aero. Microsoft's even come up with names for the scaled Aero experiences: "Aero To Go," Aero Express," and "Aero Glass."
Microsoft's laid out memory requirements for graphics cards, with 128MB needed for resolutions greater than 1280-by-1024 pixels, and 256MB necessary for 1920-by-1200-pixel resolution. For PCs that use on-board chipsets that share system memory rather than a separate video card, Microsoft's saying that 1GB of dual channel RAM is the bottom end.
Helm and Cherry agreed that the graphics requirements are both confusing and likely to stymie upgrading.
[break=Vista: Expect a Premium Push (With Premium Prices)]
Vista: Expect a Premium Push (With Premium Prices)
Microsoft still isn't talking specifics regarding its Windows Vista pricing plans. But company watchers are predicting the Redmond software maker could reap big rewards from its planned premium-edition push.
Microsoft is still holding many specifics about Windows Vista  pricing among them  close to the vest. But Redmond's reticence to talk isn't stopping company watchers from speculating.
Goldman Sachs & Co. analyst Rick Sherlund issued a research note earlier this month, noting that Goldman is now figuring Microsoft could garner an extra $1.5 billion per year in revenues simply by persuading users to buy the premium Vista versions.
Currently, the estimated retail price of Windows XP Home is $99 per copy for an upgrade, and $199 for a full version. For XP Professional, those prices are $199 and $299, respectively. But Windows XP Media Center Edition, which is an example of a current-day "premium" version of XP, sells for $320-plus per copy.
Retail sales comprise a relatively small part of Microsoft's Windows business, however. Microsoft obtains more significant shares of its Windows revenues from PC makers on the consumer side, and volume licensees on the business side.
Goldman Sachs estimates that Microsoft is charging PC makers roughly $45 per copy of Windows XP Home and $85 per copy of Windows XP Pro. While the Vista SKUs do not line up, feature-by-feature, with their XP predecessors, Goldman is estimating that Microsoft might charge PC makers $45 per copy of Vista Home, but about $65 per copy for Vista Home Premium, which includes Media Center, Tablet and other functionality built into a single SKU. (It is up to PC makers to determine how much, if any, of a Microsoft Windows price increase they will pass on to customers when selling new systems preloaded with Vista.)
"We think most of the Home market would elect the Premium version since this has the Aero/Glass interface and ability to burn DVDs and related multimedia," said Sherlund. "We have been more focused on the incremental upgrade revenues from Vista, but the bigger benefit over time is the mix shift to a higher-priced Windows SKU."
Goldman is estimating that about 75 percent of the Vista consumer demographic will go for the Home Premium version of Vista, as opposed to Home Basic.
If that $20 extra per copy for the premium home edition calculation holds, Microsoft will earn $1.5 billion a year in additional revenues, just by switching its product mix, Goldman reasoned in its April 3 research note. The change in its Vista revenue forecast led Goldman to revise its Microsoft projections, increasing its Microsoft fiscal 2007 earnings-per-share figure from $1.54 to $1.57, and its 2008 estimate from $1.75 to $1.78.
On the enterprise side, the calculation is not quite as clear-cut, but the logic still holds. If Microsoft can convince business users to flock to the Enterprise rather than the less-feature-rich Business variant of Vista, Microsoft will be able to reap significant revenue returns, even if the actual price per copy increases little or none.
Stick, Meet Carrot
Microsoft is using more of a stick than a carrot on the business side to convince customers to go with the premium Enterprise SKU. Microsoft has decided to make a number of the Vista features that it has honed for enterprise users -- specifically, the BitLocker drive encryption; Virtual PC Express virtual-machine support; the Subsystem for Unix-based Applications (SUA), which is designed to allow Unix applications to run on Vista machines; and access to all worldwide languages supported by Vista via a single deployment image – only available to users who agree to sign up for Microsoft volume-licensing agreements, such as Enterprise Agreements and Software Assurance.
One enterprise user, who asked to remain anonymous, said his company recently decided to bite the bullet and sign a Software Assurance license to get these features. He called Microsoft's premium upgrade tactics "extortion."
In addition to overcoming these kinds of negative perceptions, Microsoft has some other issues with which to contend before its premium push will work, company watchers said.
"It would appear that (Microsoft's) goal is get people onto Vista and as they use it, get them to pay to move to the next edition," through programs such as Windows Anytime Upgrade, said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "But the problem here appears to be the unknown hardware requirements. Consider the case where a customer has one of the lower editions, say Home Basic. Conceptually it is possible to upgrade to Ultimate, but what will the experience really be like? Will the computer they have with Basic really run Ultimate? What will it be like without a high-end graphics card or TPM (Trusted Platform Module)? So in the end, the customer may end up disappointed."
Cherry added that the customer set for which the effects of Microsoft's planned premium strategy is most murky is small and mid-size businesses.
"What is really unclear here is how this will play out for the small to medium sized business, who are not likely to have (volume-license) agreements, but rather buy from OEMs. Will they be forced to buy (Vista) Ultimate (edition)?"
It's also still uncertain the extent to which Microsoft will up Vista's street and OEM/PC maker prices by the time it launches the product in January 2007. While many industry watchers are not expecting Microsoft to jack-up wildly Windows' prices, there is some wiggle room.
According to Microsoft's own Windows research, cited by company officials at Microsoft's 2005 Financial Analyst Day meeting, users base their operating-system purchase decisions on first on compatibility, followed by feature set, security and quality, cost, availability and brand preference. In other words, operating-system pricing is only fourth on users' lists, when evaluating new systems.
[break=Will Vista Be the Last Operating System Microsoft Produces?]
Will Vista Be the Last Operating System Microsoft Produces?
I don’t think Microsoft will ship another Operating System after Vista launches. I believe that a combination of technical difficulties and changing markets will prevent it from creating a product that is relevant in the market. Consider this, if the latest shipping dates are to be believed, it will have taken Microsoft over six years to get Windows Vista out the door and to its consumers.
And based on past events, it is safe to assume that Vista will require at least one service pack before it is truly ready for use. Of course, factoring in the normal Microsoft delays for producing patches, such a comprehensive service pack will probably take another year before it can be released to users. That would mean that it will have taken Microsoft 7+ years to make a usable operating system.
Now consider how long it could take Microsoft to produce Vista’s successor. If the added complexity of this new OS increases the development time by only 25% (not an unreasonable figure) of what it took to make Vista, then it will have been in development for almost 8 years.
That means if Vista comes out in 2007, it won’t be replaced until 2015. To put that into perspective, if Apple continues on with its release cycle of OS X (and factoring in increases in development time) they could, counting Leopard, release 4 to 5 new operating systems by the time Microsoft releases one.
But keeping up with Apple won’t be Microsoft’s biggest concern. What will prevent Microsoft from releasing another OS is the changing market. For Vista’s successor to have a hope of selling, the company has to assume that no fundamental shifts in technology will occur for almost a decade! That seems, overly optimistic at best. With Google threatening to release a web-based OS, and Apple potentially using virtualization to run all Windows applications, Microsoft might find that by the time it can cobble something together, it no longer has a market interested in its product.
Microsoft will find itself in this position (or one like it) all too soon, and it has no one but itself to blame. Here are the two biggest factors that are slowly killing Microsoft from within.
Code base
The amount of code that makes up Windows has simply become too large to work with. Now, you can blame this on anything you want (backwards compatibiliy would be high on my list), but ultimately the cause doesn’t matter. What matters is that building new features has become impossible, and debugging this mess has become impossible + 1.
This was most clearly witnessed when Bill Gates got up onstage and informed his eager audience that the codebase for Vista had become so large and tangled that they simply had to throw it all away and start over from a point they knew was stable. Guess what? That problem isn’t going to go away by throwing another service pack at it. With each version of Windows released the amount of code grows and the strain gets greater. However, the amount of code isn’t the only problem here.
The structure of the OS itself is fundamentally flawed. There are too many antiquated ideas (drive letters, the registry, etc.) and constraining bounds (NTFS) to allow for anymore growth. A drastic rewrite is the only way to solve this problem. The only real question Microsoft needs to ask is how much should we rewrite?
Management
The last few years has seen a flurry of restructuring at Microsoft. Key people have left (most noticably for Google) and even loyal employees who still believe the hype have begun to criticize management and air their grievances on personal blogs. The leadership of Microsoft has failed miserably and Vista is only the beginning in what looks to be an impressive series of embarrassments.
It is time for a change. If Microsoft still hopes to be in the OS market a decade from now then those changes can’t come soon enough.
