Vista Home Basic embraced by small businesses
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Vista Home Basic is the lowest of operating systems. It lacks many features consumers would look for such as Aero Glass and a few under the hood differences. Home Basic has found a home with small businesses looking for cheap PCs.
Windows Home Premium has won the consumer market. According to ZDnet, Home Premium is installed on 75% of consumer PCs sold. Basic has been an utter failure in the consumer market.
One would think that businesses would be going after Vista Business for both its low and high end computers. That’s not the case either. Vista Home Basic has found its way onto 58% of low end business PCs. High End business computers are sold with 57% as XP machines and 37% as Vista Business.
The reason XP and Vista Business are a success on the high end business PCs is that both include the ability to join a domain and are eligible for volume licensing and upgrades. Home Basic lacks both features.
With Windows 7 looming on the horizon, it’s time Microsoft consider dumping the featureless and almost useless Home Basic. And some name changing is in order as well. I would suggest going with two editions of Windows 7. Windows 7 Home and Windows 7 Professional.
If that sounds familiar that’s because it’s the naming convention that XP used and it was very hard to distinguish the features between Home and Professional. This almost needs to happen if Microsoft doesn’t want the same criticism that Vista faced. Let’s also hope that the company manages to fix the problems with UAC at the same time.
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October 10th, 2008
Agreed.
In the consumer, there should be 1 version. It contains all the hoopla that any consumer would want. multimedia, photo edition, internet browser, aero glass, etc etc etc. feature should be in module so they can be easily be yanked out by dell, hp, etc etc if they want to build a low cost low power pc
October 10th, 2008
“Vista home basic embraced by small business”.
No doubt small businesses are also enthusiastically hugging cacti.
October 20th, 2008
I like the idea that they make more “economical” versions for people to afford it. Then they can still sell premium features for high prices to rich corporations. Maybe they can sell them by “features” instead of versions. hmmm.
Well, I think the world’s average installation is Ultimate anyway because cost is not an issue when most of the world pirates Windows (as usual). You can turn off features to enhance performance of low budget machines so Ultimate is the thing that will go around most in China and such.