The monopolist's dilemma.

[reddragdiva]

• NotN: Jacqui Smith denies expense wrongdoings.

Windows 7 Starter Edition for netbooks: you can run three apps. That's all. They want to upsell you to the next version up. ($0-$5 a copy to OEMs is what they blame for their bad January financials. Welcome to competition.)

Make one of those apps Firefox or Chrome running Google Office, Google Mail and Google Chat.

If I thought Microsoft was good at Apple-style joined-up thinking, I’d think they were planning to put something like this out themselves and cannibalise their own market instead of letting Google cannibalise it for them. But they’re not, happily letting one division cripple another division's ideas. I suspect they’ll make a half-arsed effort such as a cut-down Office Live.

Imagine ... a usable Windows 7 Starter Edition, because one of the apps is an app platform.

(I've been trying the Windows 7 in a 512MB virtual machine. Even virtualised, in that little memory, it's quite usable and nicely responsive. Slow to start up and sucks power like anything, of course. Anecdotal reports are it's fine on netbooks if you don't mind a five-minute boot. Of course, your battery will still last twice as long on Ubuntu.)

Comments

[ravenevermore.livejournal.com]

This really disappointed me because, dammit, I'm really grooving 7 on my desktop at work. I haven't been tempted to flip the partition siwtch back to XP. And it looks like they're doing even more shortbus thinking with this release than they did with Vista. I intend to do some windows 7 testing on some of the netbooks we're getting at work. see what i can tweak the beta down to.

[vampwillow]

Ignore the silly boy; Win7 ultimate runs wonderfluffy on laptots (am running it on an AspireOne presently and not found its limits yet)

[reddragdiva]

Yes, I have no reason to think they won't make it run reasonably smoothly on netbooks. It's the three-app limit that's mindboggling.

[ravenevermore.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to install the beta on my macbooks second partition, however this would involve clearing off the second partition. Since I haven't been using XP as much as i'd thought I might, it has become less a second boot drive, and more a temporary file store for media files.
We've got an AspireOne here, and are currently awaiting some of the newish Lenovo netbooks which I find very nice (had a demo unit on my desk for a week and it just felt sturdier and more laptop like than any of the other's I had played with, er, I mean evaluated in my role as Network Manager *nods sternly*).

I've only had to restart my desktop 7 install thus far due to updating the Nvidia drivers, and because of an unexpected series of powercuts. I am greatly disturbed by how stable I am finding it.

[vampwillow]

I'm sure I saw that the 'starter' edition was for other countries rather than small machines. Anyway ...I'm running Win7 ultimate on my laptot and it is wonderful. No problems and *quick to boot* (ten seconds max from sleep, 35-40 seconds from cold)

[reddragdiva]

Reports are both ways. There are definite plans to sell a three-app-limited version for netbooks and let the OEMs freely decide (of course!) what they want to sell.

[vampwillow]

from the reports I've seen, it is all the one product and you can pay online for an 'upgrade' to release other functionality so having a 'max3' cheap would actually be a good thing for those who want to dump Windows anyway rather than having to pay for more when they don't want it at all

[reddragdiva]

They're already literally giving away XP to preserve market share. The 3-app limit is presumably all they can think of for a differentiator. The problem is basically that their business model is obsolete in the face of adequate competition.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Three applications?
Email (Unfortunately Outlook 2007 which seems to use the resources of an entire African country to do anything).
Browser
OOffice....
Winamp
Semagic

I think, if what the slashdot article says is true they are deluded.

[reddragdiva]

No shit. However, all that in Google Chrome is one app. And, of course, Chrome runs each tab as a separate process, so your IRC crashing doesn't take down your browsing (as it does when Chatzilla takes down your Firefox).

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding somewhat like a youngish old fart, it's not exactly 'welcome to competition'. Microsoft did exactly the same thing 15 years ago to OS/2 which had Microsoft briefly on the ropes and more than a little worried[1].

Of course the situation is a little different now - the Internet is more mature, the quality and availability of free software is higher and computers are much faster and more capacious.

Hiring someone to defend you against what is obviously seen as a viable threat is an obvious move. There's also the less obvious arm twisting, shilling and downright illegal stealing (see Microsoft court cases, passim) that goes on, of course.

Having said that, I quite like Windows 7, although it's not exactly a revolution over Vista, which isn't that bad either.

[1] Leaving aside that had IBM succeeded they'd have had a formidable re-engineering challenge, which they generally failed to fix in OS/2 PowerPC[2]. Some parts of OS/2's architecture remained gnarly, unusual and downright old. Fundamentally NT was and is architecturally superior.
[2] It did exist. Very briefly.

[ajohnymous.livejournal.com]

[quote]Make one of those apps Firefox or Chrome running Google Office, Google Mail and Google Chat.[/quote]
Won't work. Along with the Windows 7 launch, the RIAA has made deals with all major ISP to allow subscribers only 3 concurrent TCP sessions... unless they upgrade to a much more expensive "Professional" or "Ultimate" connection.