Perhaps you’re unaware that there are lawsuits against Microsoft and OEM’s about the confusion between Home Basic versus Home Premium, and it’s not just because of the issue of “Vista Capable”. While I can understand the different versions just fine, your average consumer can’t and doesn’t understand it.

Richard makes an excellent point here with Mac OSX… as much as I hate it, they make it simple. You buy one copy, and it has everything in it. It’s simple.

Let me put it this way… I’d rather Windows be more like the Lord of the Rings… One Windows to Rule Them All, and I’ll pay $150/copy without hesitation to know that I have all the best functionality Microsoft has to offer.

Microsoft, save yourself and save us…

Have one single SKU that features it all, and give it away for free for home/non-business use.

Make it available for $99 for business use.

Done :)

Of course, the situation is simplified now because Media Center and Tablet edition are rolled into Home Premium and Ultimate.

Even if I get rid of the N editions there were still more versions of XP available for the determined customer to choose from and be confused by.

This is basically a non-argument and Engadget are just trying to manufacture controversy. There’s also no point pining for some sort of Home/Professional golden age because, as I’ve pointed out, it never existed.

I think it’s too early to make that statement for sure. I don’t disagree, but let’s see if Starter is in the mix for netbooks. Personally, I hope not.

Excellent question and I can tell you that Win 7 Home Premium runs just as well as Ultimate on a netbook. You’d obviously expect that since it has less functionality than Ultimate, but I wanted to point it out.

I think the *real* question here is: what version(s) will OEMs sell with netbooks? Given how well Ultimate has been running, this isn’t a question of technology; it’s a business question.

@TurtleWhisperer, Richard, and GooTHings2Life: If you have trouble figuring out which one to pick out of these, I’d shudder to see you flip out in a cereal aisle at the supermarket.

Look, Starter is not going to be available for most folks who are reading this. Scratch that off the list.

Enterprise is essentially Volume Licensing with some additional feature targeted at large businesses; it should be obvious that you wouldn’t be buying this either. So we’re left with:

Home Basic
Home Premium
Profesional
Ultimate

Premium is essentially Basic plus shiny stuff. So we’ve collapsed it down to three choices.

Home Basic/Premium
Professional
Ultimate

Was that really that hard?

Your point would be valid if all those variation builds were available on the shelves for average consumers. Technically, there were only 4 for most consumers– Home, Professional, and then Media Center (Home with Media Extensions) and Tablet PC (Professional with Tablet Extensions) on those specific types of devices.

As such, it was essentially two choices, and it was incredibly obvious how to choose.

All the other variations were regionalized versions released waaaaay after the fact of lawsuits.

I’ll second Richard’s thought that I wish they’d just stick with Home and Professional and be done with it.

K.I.S.S.

Assuming that you are referring to XP, here are the different editions of that version that were available:

Starter
Home
Home-N
Media Center (2 versions)
Professional
Professional-N
Tablet PC Edition
Professional 64-bit
Volume License

The closest thing MS offered to your suggestion was Windows 2000 and Windows Me back in 2000.

I presume you didn’t find it too difficult to pick the version of XP that you wanted so you should find that it’s not too difficult to get the right version of Windows 7.

now we have 3 versions of each…

Starter/Basic/Premium – Professional/Enterprise/Ultimate

not only do they never learn, they make it even worse. it’s astonishing that these people lead the world.