Microsoft to offer crippled Windows 7 for netbooks
Netbook PCs are priced sufficiently low that Microsoft’s usual price for Windows becomes a substantial fraction of the total cost. In the case of Vista, the operating system wouldn’t run at all. To keep Linux from making any headway, Microsoft was forced to keep Windows XP alive and to offer it at a reduced price to netbook manufacturers. Microsoft also worked to make Windows 7 less ponderous and demanding of system resources so that it could run on netbooks. However, the usual Microsoft pricing remains a high cost for netbooks so Microsoft has come up with a scheme to offer a lower priced but crippled version of Windows 7. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Microsoft Corp. is taking an unusual approach with its new Windows 7 operating system: Customers buying many of the least-expensive laptops with the software are likely to be limited to running three applications at a time and miss out on other key features, or pay for an upgrade.
The strategy is one of the ways the software giant is responding to inexpensive portable computers called netbooks, a bright spot in the gloomy personal-computer business that is causing many companies to modify their business plans.
Microsoft’s strategy is clear. It is making the upgrade (for a fee) to an uncrippled Windows 7 easy, banking on the likelihood that average PC users will cough up the extra rather than go through installing Linux if they are unhappy with the crippled Windows 7. That strategy, together with Microsoft’s grip on the whole ecosystem of vendors and retail sellers, looks to keep Windows as the dominant system on consumer PCs. The obstacles for other operating systems, no matter how good they are, are formidable.
Added later: At Computerworld, Preston Gralla says crippling Windows 7 is bad marketing:
In one of the worst marketing moves for an upcoming operating system I can ever recall, Microsoft has said that it will limit to three the number of applications people can run simultaneously on many Windows 7-equipped netbooks. I can’t think of a better way to kill demand for the new operating system.
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