Official Windows 7 SKUs revealed: six editions

[darkassain]

Absolutely, Home Premium will get shortened to Home when there is no Basic in the picture, so now you have Windows 7 Home or Professional, kinda has a nice ring to it, no?

I'm still curious how they will handle 32 bit/64 bit. Current retail of Ultimate and Home Premium have both disks, I believe, but OEM only has one. Both versions would fit on a DVD9 (dual layer), but apparently enough DVD players cannot handle dual layer, so that probably won't fly.

PhreePhly

you make a good point...
double layer maybe?
have one layer 32 one 64?
one one color one another

intelligent setup where it checks whether your complete hardware config supports 64 and then a popup saying that you can install it and that it offers better security better performance and such...:sarc:

 

[napilopez]

Well, after thinking some more and reading all of this its not so bad . The choice basically is basically home premium or professional, reminding me of the fresh XP days. I hope that like for XP, the packaging for professional is blue, seeing as thats my fav color

 

[killercat]

thank you...
+rep for proving me wrong..
i learned something new...

Thanks for the rep, thought it might be an interesting read

I wasn't sure about opening another thread cocerning the Win7 SKUs, so I'll just post it here...
Paul Thurrott's take on the Windows 7 Product Editions

 

[jackdelamare]

*rolls eyes*

Why bother? Just have one version. Oh well.

 

[PhreePhly]

*rolls eyes*

Why bother? Just have one version. Oh well.

The biggest reason is simple; MS is a business, and by offering different SKUs, they make more money. Different SKUs focused on particular markets makes more money in the long run.

MS is primarily a software company. Their revenue is generated by software sales. As an example, Apple's primary business is selling hardware, so they could care less about software sales, and to keep their books simple, having only one version of the consumer OS is better.

Figure that 99% of the public will not need Ultimate, but you know many geeks will buy it just to have it, and that will mean more revenue to MS.

The bigger question will be the pricing structure. If MS can keep Home Premium somewhere around $150 for the retail upgrade, I think they will do well. Win 7 is a good upgrade from XP, it looks like from a marketing standpoint that it will most likely sell well.

PhreePhly