The Line Up!

Windows 7 Home Premium – This is the successor to Windows Vista Home Premium, and Microsoft expects it to be the most common edition sold, the standard for virtually all consumer PCs. It includes the Aero interface with its Windows 7 enhancements, plus Windows Media Center, DVD playback support, and multi-touch and handwriting features. I’m also told (but can’t yet confirm) that image-based backup is included in this edition for the first time.

Windows 7 Professional – This edition drops the Business label used in Windows Vista and goes back to the old XP-era name, presumably to give XP users more comfort in their upgrade decision. Unlike Vista Business, this edition contains all features in the Home Premium edition, including Media Center. For the extra cost, you get more traditional business features like the ability to join a Windows domain, group policy based management tools, Remote Desktop host capabilities, network-based backup features, and support for the Encrypting file system.

Windows 7 Ultimate/Enterprise – In the retail channel, this edition will be called Ultimate; for corporate customers with a Select license agreement, it will be called Enterprise. In either case, the feature set includes everything in Professional edition plus support for BitLocker whole-drive encryption (and the new BitLocker To Go feature, which adds high-grade encryption to removable media). This edition also includes all supported language packs (those cost extra for other editions) and the capability to boot from a VHD.

Microsoft is de-emphasizing the Ultimate edition, which has only been able to gather a tiny share (a Microsoft told me yesterday that Ultimate’s share is in the 3-5 percent range). It will still be available, but primarily for those who want BitLocker and as a premium upgrade for super-high-end machines where the Ultimate name might add some cachet.

The real news is that each edition is a superset of the one before it. That means you can upgrade from, say, Home Premium to Professional by purchasing an upgrade key and then “unlocking” the additional features. The entire process takes 5-10 minutes, I’m told by people who’ve tested it, and involves none of the hassles of the current upgrade strategy, which requires a complete reinstallation.

So what happened to those other editions? They’re still around, but your ability to buy them is highly constrained.

Windows 7 Home Basic, which lacks the Aero interface, will be available for sale only in emerging markets and will not legally be available for sale in the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, and other developed countries.

Windows 7 Starter Edition, with its artificial restriction on performance (you can only run three simultaneous programs) will be available for sale worldwide, but only as a preinstalled operating system on OEM-built PCs “limited to specific types of hardware.” Microsoft is clearly confident that it has pared down the resource requirements of Windows 7 Home Premium so that it will run acceptably on the generation of netbooks that will be current when Windows 7 arrives later this year. It’s hard to imagine the Windows 7 Starter Edition name being much of a selling point. Microsoft may even be taking the calculated risk of discouraging Windows 7 from being installed on underpowered notebooks and triggering disappointing reviews.

An article by “Neil McAllister” from PCWORLD.COM

Is that spin I smell? Despite earlier rumors to the contrary, Microsoft seems now to be standing firm behind a 2010 release date for the next-generation version of Windows, currently known as Windows 7. Nobody is being too specific just yet, but a letter sent by Microsoft senior vice president Bill Veghte reiterated that the new OS would ship “approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista.”

So the Countdown has officially begun! Given this news I should probably start a Countdown Widget in celebration of this news. I seriously doubt Microsoft will stay true to this deadline.

Typically when Microsoft ships a new OS (like Windows Vista), we immediately start talking about the next version-which begs two questions: 1) is Microsoft working on a new version of Windows, and if so, 2) why aren’t you talking about it?

I thought I would spend a minute giving you an update on where we are. First, yes, we are working on a new version of Windows. As you likely know, it’s called Windows 7.We are always looking for new ways to deliver great experiences for our customers.  This is especially true of Windows – where we’re constantly examining trends in hardware, software and services to ensure that we continue to drive the innovation that has both made Windows the world’s most popular operating system and has provided a foundation on which our partners built great products and businesses. When we shipped Windows 2000, we were already working on Windows XP and we started working on Windows Vista even before we released Windows XP. So naturally, we’ve been thinking about the investments we made in Windows Vista and how we can build on these for the next version of Windows.

What is a little different today is when and how we are talking about the next version of Windows.  So, w

hy the change in approach?  We know that when we talk about our plans for the next release of Windows, people take action. As a result, we can significantly impact our partners and our customers if we broadly share information that later changes.  With Windows 7, we’re trying to more carefully plan how we share information with our customers and partners.  This means sharing the right level of information at the right time depending on the needs of the audience.  For instance, several months ago we began privately sharing our preliminary plans for Windows 7 with software and hardware partners who build on the Windows platform.  This gave them an opportunity to give us feedback and gave us the opportunity to incorporate their input into our plans. As the product becomes more complete, we will have the opportunity to share our plans more broadly. Steven Sinofsky, Windows and Windows Live Engineering SVP, talks more about this in his interview with CNET’s Ina Fried, published today: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9951638-56.html.

We know that this is a change in our approach, but we are confident that it will help us not only to build even better products, but also to be more predictable in the delivery of our products. We also know that this change has led to some confusion, so we would like to share information today that will hopefully clear up some of this.

Before we talk about what’s ahead, we should take a look at where we are today with Windows Vista.  From a quality perspective, both Windows Vista SP1 and the ecosystem have delivered measurable progress in the six dimensions of quality we track — device compatibility, application compatibility, reliability, performance, battery life and security. The business results speak for themselves. As of March 31, we had sold more than 140 million Windows Vista licenses, and analyst firm forecasts indicate that Windows Vista adoption among businesses is on a similar pace as Windows XP in similar timeframes. Millions of enterprise users are already running Windows Vista, and we invite you to read their stories published in more than 100 case studies. The benefits they are experiencing range from energy conservation, lower TCO for mobile users, and greater security. Our job is not done, but we’ve worked hard with our ecosystem to improve the quality of Windows Vista and we’re pleased with the customer response.

Another question we often get asked is whether Windows 7 is a major release. The answer is “yes”  – it’s hard to describe any product that is used by millions of people and worked on by thousands of engineers as anything else. That said, the long-term architectural investments we introduced in Windows Vista and then refined for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 will carry forward in Windows 7. Windows Vista established a very solid foundation, particularly on subsystems such as graphics, audio, and storage. Windows Server 2008 was built on that foundation and Windows 7 will be as well. Contrary to some speculation, Microsoft is not creating a new kernel for Windows 7. Rather, we are refining the kernel architecture and componentization model introduced in Windows Vista.  While these changes will increase our engineering agility, they will not impact the user experience or reduce application or hardware compatibility. In fact, one of our design goals for Windows 7 is that it will run on the recommended hardware we specified for Windows Vista and that the applications and devices that work with Windows Vista will be compatible with Windows 7.

We are well into the development process of Windows 7, and we’re happy to report that we’re still on track to ship approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista. As always, we will be releasing early builds of Windows 7 prior to its general availability as a means to gain feedback, but we’re not yet ready to discuss timing and specific plans for any Beta releases. In the meantime, customers can confidently continue with their Windows Vista deployment plans.

This article was Posted by Chris Flores on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 4:09 AM

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/05/27/communicating-windows-7.aspx