Nine different products = massive confusion for users. Apple certainly made more money when they simplified their computer offerings so that users didn't have to do extreme mental exercises to compare features and buy.
There's absolutely no need for so many Windows versions. I don't care what their argument is, neither manufacturers nor consumers need that many versions to choose from. This is just Microsoft's way of nickle and diming their customers, even though I doubt they'll even have success in doing that.
Is it going to be that confusing? Most people have their choice made for them by their PC manufacturer which is usually the home version unless their IT department specifies something else.
Most of these editions won't be widely available on the shops either I bet, there will be specific versions for enterprise users or for ARM etc. The real choice will come down to 2 versions (or so) as it has with win7.
If you are buying the OS itself as an upgrade then it is probably because you want specific features and your going to want to be able to choose the edition you have.
>Most people have their choice made for them by their PC manufacturer //
It's a up-sell opportunity for PC sales staff too - people see the bottom price based on the MS Windows with all the decent functions removed. The sales staff will tell them they need to have MS Windows 8 Super-non-breaking-hacker-resistant-anti-mildew Edition instead ... oh and by the way now you've settled on that you'll need extra RAM otherwise it will run slow as anything.
The lack of knowledge about the different editions basically cripples a regular buyer's ability to decide for themselves.
I've never seen sales staff try and upsell a Windows edition to someone who didn't need it (in the UK at least), not saying it doesn't happen of course and if your running a non server version are the hardware requirements any different?
AFAIK the only reason you'd need something other than Win7 Home is if you want to connect to an AD network or have legacy software you need to run.
You get features like encrypted folders etc in other versions but this can easily be replicated for free with software like truecrypt.
There is no perfectly generalisable strategy. Simplify or die works for Apple, but it assumes you know exactly what the customer wants and are willing to have those you guessed wrong for walk away.
Tim Cook used to hand out Competing Against Time, which advocates reducing cycle time to increase variety (Apple tweaks this to variety over time, i.e. rapid development).
I agree, however, that consumers should have one version that smartly configures itself. Keep price discrimination for corporate/enterprise customers.
Not really. They segment the market pretty well, and few people buy the retail box and have to think about this stuff. Basically, it's cheap PC, or PC that does video for consumers.
The key difference is Apple has "computer offerings". Microsoft doesn't. With my enterprise hat on, I don't want to pay for video editors, etc. Likewise, the parent buying a laptop for a child doesn't want to pay for full disk encryption that is FIPS compliant.
Amongst those editions: PreRelease Edition. Enterprise Eval Edition. Prerelease Arm Edition. Users won't be confused. They will buy their computer, and use what it comes with. They'll go to the store, and they'll have 3 editions: Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. And most people won't even bother buying it, they'll just buy a computer and use what comes with that.
TechCrunch is overstating their case a little, here. Certainly, that screenshot shows "PrereleaseARMEdition","EnterpriseEvalEdition", and so on. Obviously these aren't relevant.
The different flavours of Windows are disliked by consumers, and liked by corporate customers. The answer is clear: just have one 'consumer' edition and stop selling both Home and Home Premium. The rest- Professional, Ultimate, Enterprise, etc. are all fine.
Pet gripe: I wish people would stop saying that OS X costs $29.99 and that Windows costs considerably more. They both operate on considerably different models- OS X is released once per year, Windows much less frequently (and with service packs).
OSX isn't released once a year. With the exception of the just-announced Mountain Lion, it has received major updates every two years since 2003. It also gets "service packs" in the form of point releases every couple of months.
OS X doesn't cost $29.99. It costs $29.99 plus the cost of Apple hardware (the cheapest of which is the $600 Mini). Unless you go the Hackintosh route, you can't install OS X on non-Apple hardware.
Whereas you can install your $100 Windows license on your choice of hardware devices that support it.
All votes on HN are anonymous, whether they're upvotes or downvotes. Showing who voted which way on what just isn't one of the features of the site, and that's a good thing.
> The answer is clear: just have one 'consumer' edition and stop selling both Home and Home Premium. The rest- Professional, Ultimate, Enterprise, etc. are all fine.
If you think Microsoft has all those editions just-for-the hell-of-it, now you're overstating your case a little.
I'd assume they've done their homework and found that 6+ editions bring in more revenue than 1-3 editions long before I'd assume my own unfounded theories on the subject.
What's clear here is that consumers are willing to pay Microsoft more money when there are 6 versions to pick from.
Not a bad article, but it misses the key two words of the whole thing:
Price discrimination.
Price discrimination is attempting to get the maximum price a person or organization would be willing to pay.
Apple doesn't do that -- they just go 100% upmarket. Microsoft has the challenge of trying to get top dollar from wealthy people using top-notch machines while also preserving all their market share at the low end of the market.
It's hard to say which model is better. Apple's is sexier and wins more spectacularly, for sure, and I love Apple. I'm all-in on Apple. But the Apple model is also immensely more prone to catastrophe. Two bad product cycles in a row, or missing an emerging trend and it might be curtains for Apple again. Well, they have the huge cash position. But it could get pretty ugly if they miss the boat, whereas Microsoft can even endure a mess like the huge delay post-XP followed by the heavily-panned Vista, and still be okay.
My short time with Apple's OS (4 years), I noticed Apple doesn't make drastic changes but rather alot of tweaks and gradual improvements. (From a UI/UX perspective)
Windows on the other hand makes erratic leaps and breaks users' expectation (from previous versions) alot, and have to relearn alot of new flow. (Not just the OS but its Office Suite as well. The Tabbed categorization of Toolbars really frustrated me). Now that with 8, they're shifting their focus, again. Will it work? Who knows – I just know I have to learn everything again, and it's daunting.
Interestingly it is almost opposite picture from developer's point of view -- apple breaks things every major release, windows still supports stuff back from win95 days.
> Microsoft has the challenge of trying to get top dollar from wealthy people using top-notch machines while also preserving all their market share at the low end of the market.
Microsoft doesn't even see it that way. They inherited their monopoly directly from IBM. Their customers are really not consumers, but the PC manufacturers.
The revenue Microsoft gets from OS sales directly to consumers is meagre compared to their licensing revenue from manufacturers.
And this is the problem - all those windows flavors are their product to sell to the PC Manufacturers (who add drivers, support software, and probably some bloat/trail ware) who sell the actual physical hardware to consumers.
Where do they find these mythical "confused" consumers ? This trope is really getting overused IMHO.
As far as I can tell, most consumers use the version of windows installed on their desktops/laptops/tablets. Enterprise users have their decisions made for them anyway by corporate IT. So that leaves a minority group who i) plan to upgrade ii) assemble their own boxes. The latter are sufficiently educated and the former usually consider a simple one-to-one mapping for their upgrade path ("I have windows 7 home, i upgrade to windows 8 home").
I purchased a netbook, and the only OS available was Windows 7 "starter edition" -- and you can't even change the wallpaper! So, I am confused why this product even exists. (But I guess if Microsoft wants to put their brandname on something which is intentionally defective, that's up to them.)
Apple follows this model too, just on a hardware level, not a software level. All of their products come in different flavors intended to add a little price discrimination to their product lines. E.g. the 5+ different types of macbook pros.
Absolutely correct. The key difference between MS and Apple is that MS is a software company and Apple is a hardware company.
As a software company, MS tries to maximize SW revenue by differentiating their basic product into various flavors at various price points.
As a hardware company, Apple does the same thing with Macs and iWhatevers. Then they throw in the software for a nominal fee (nominal for the affluent people who can afford Apple's hardware, that is).
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadAnd they don't.
> This is just Microsoft's way of nickle and diming their customers
No, it's not. Did you even look at the different versions? Eval versions? Prerelease Editions? Enterprise editions?
You'll see three on the shelf: Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. The confusion is made up.
Most of these editions won't be widely available on the shops either I bet, there will be specific versions for enterprise users or for ARM etc. The real choice will come down to 2 versions (or so) as it has with win7.
If you are buying the OS itself as an upgrade then it is probably because you want specific features and your going to want to be able to choose the edition you have.
It's a up-sell opportunity for PC sales staff too - people see the bottom price based on the MS Windows with all the decent functions removed. The sales staff will tell them they need to have MS Windows 8 Super-non-breaking-hacker-resistant-anti-mildew Edition instead ... oh and by the way now you've settled on that you'll need extra RAM otherwise it will run slow as anything.
The lack of knowledge about the different editions basically cripples a regular buyer's ability to decide for themselves.
AFAIK the only reason you'd need something other than Win7 Home is if you want to connect to an AD network or have legacy software you need to run.
You get features like encrypted folders etc in other versions but this can easily be replicated for free with software like truecrypt.
Tim Cook used to hand out Competing Against Time, which advocates reducing cycle time to increase variety (Apple tweaks this to variety over time, i.e. rapid development).
I agree, however, that consumers should have one version that smartly configures itself. Keep price discrimination for corporate/enterprise customers.
The key difference is Apple has "computer offerings". Microsoft doesn't. With my enterprise hat on, I don't want to pay for video editors, etc. Likewise, the parent buying a laptop for a child doesn't want to pay for full disk encryption that is FIPS compliant.
The different flavours of Windows are disliked by consumers, and liked by corporate customers. The answer is clear: just have one 'consumer' edition and stop selling both Home and Home Premium. The rest- Professional, Ultimate, Enterprise, etc. are all fine.
Pet gripe: I wish people would stop saying that OS X costs $29.99 and that Windows costs considerably more. They both operate on considerably different models- OS X is released once per year, Windows much less frequently (and with service packs).
$29.99 still seems like a great deal to me.
Whereas you can install your $100 Windows license on your choice of hardware devices that support it.
edit:
Okay, the point being made is "Apple hardware is not cheap, and you need Apple hardware to properly run OS X".
It's made in a very hand-wavy way, though, which I find a bit annoying.
Edit: At least the poster now acknowledges this. Anonymous downvotes? And people claim we're not edging closer to Reddit more and more each day.
All votes on HN are anonymous, whether they're upvotes or downvotes. Showing who voted which way on what just isn't one of the features of the site, and that's a good thing.
If you think Microsoft has all those editions just-for-the hell-of-it, now you're overstating your case a little.
I'd assume they've done their homework and found that 6+ editions bring in more revenue than 1-3 editions long before I'd assume my own unfounded theories on the subject.
What's clear here is that consumers are willing to pay Microsoft more money when there are 6 versions to pick from.
Price discrimination.
Price discrimination is attempting to get the maximum price a person or organization would be willing to pay.
Apple doesn't do that -- they just go 100% upmarket. Microsoft has the challenge of trying to get top dollar from wealthy people using top-notch machines while also preserving all their market share at the low end of the market.
It's hard to say which model is better. Apple's is sexier and wins more spectacularly, for sure, and I love Apple. I'm all-in on Apple. But the Apple model is also immensely more prone to catastrophe. Two bad product cycles in a row, or missing an emerging trend and it might be curtains for Apple again. Well, they have the huge cash position. But it could get pretty ugly if they miss the boat, whereas Microsoft can even endure a mess like the huge delay post-XP followed by the heavily-panned Vista, and still be okay.
Windows on the other hand makes erratic leaps and breaks users' expectation (from previous versions) alot, and have to relearn alot of new flow. (Not just the OS but its Office Suite as well. The Tabbed categorization of Toolbars really frustrated me). Now that with 8, they're shifting their focus, again. Will it work? Who knows – I just know I have to learn everything again, and it's daunting.
Microsoft doesn't even see it that way. They inherited their monopoly directly from IBM. Their customers are really not consumers, but the PC manufacturers.
The revenue Microsoft gets from OS sales directly to consumers is meagre compared to their licensing revenue from manufacturers.
And this is the problem - all those windows flavors are their product to sell to the PC Manufacturers (who add drivers, support software, and probably some bloat/trail ware) who sell the actual physical hardware to consumers.
http://windows8beta.com/2012/03/exclusive-windows-8-sku-reve...
A week back there was this rumour of only 3 editions:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/seo/windows-8-skus-mentioned-on-hp...
As far as I can tell, most consumers use the version of windows installed on their desktops/laptops/tablets. Enterprise users have their decisions made for them anyway by corporate IT. So that leaves a minority group who i) plan to upgrade ii) assemble their own boxes. The latter are sufficiently educated and the former usually consider a simple one-to-one mapping for their upgrade path ("I have windows 7 home, i upgrade to windows 8 home").
So, did I miss anything ?
As a software company, MS tries to maximize SW revenue by differentiating their basic product into various flavors at various price points.
As a hardware company, Apple does the same thing with Macs and iWhatevers. Then they throw in the software for a nominal fee (nominal for the affluent people who can afford Apple's hardware, that is).
Nothing to see here. Move along.