Introducing Windows 10 Editions

Dear Microsoft,<p>Windows 10.<p>Just release Windows 10.<p>No one knows the difference between Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Extreme and Windows 10 Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Supreme. Your customers actually don&#x27;t care.<p>And as long as you keep selling a baffling array of variations on the same product, no one will believe you&#x27;ve turned over a new leaf.<p>Windows 10.<p>With love,<p>Guy on the Internet<p>PS: There should be no &quot;it&#x27;s even more secure&quot; version. They should all be &quot;even more secure.&quot;

I realize Microsoft has to price segment, which requires they call out an &quot;Enterprise&quot; category for Mobile and Laptop&#x2F;Desktop, but sometimes I wonder if they really need all of these categories.<p>For example, do they really get significant financial value from having a Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Education, Windows 10 Pro? <i>particularly</i> as they are offering it as a free upgrade to Windows 7&#x2F;8 users.<p>Notice they don&#x27;t have a Windows 10 Mobile Home, Windows 10 Mobile Education, and Windows 10 Mobile Pro - just plain, &quot;Windows 10 Mobile&quot;.<p>My suspicion is they would have managed to avoid customer confusion, and captured pretty much all the same economic value, with a simple list of:<p><pre><code> Windows 10 Windows 10 Mobile Windows 10 Enterprise Windows 10 Mobile Enteprise</code></pre>

Please Microsoft, just one Windows 10, the technical side sounds great(one OS runs everywhere) but your marketing guy is messing things up, the list of various window10 flavors made me dizzy and I had to quit reading quickly.

OK they messed it up, again? Anyone with a laptop preloaded with the crippled Home edition (meaning most laptops) will not be able to take it to the work place and connect it to the domain. Then there&#x27;s Pro and Enterprise, and most people don&#x27;t know why they need Enterprise.

And suddenly I feel a lot less excited about possibly switching back to Windows. With 10, I was hoping for a single version for everything going forward. But if Microsoft is going to continue splitting their product lines and making it a headache for me to know which versions have the features I need (ex: RDP), I&#x27;m just going to not give them a second chance no matter how much they open source. It&#x27;s just extra grief that I don&#x27;t need as a normal end user.

One thing I haven&#x27;t discovered yet is whether the installation of 10 is going to be a brand new install rather than an upgrade. In other words, will it be necessary to reinstall all my applications after moving to 10?

Hah, Microsoft&#x27;s DNA returns with a vengeance.<p>They tried to change, but couldn&#x27;t &#x2F;not&#x2F; segment their market, even if it impairs the customer experience. That&#x27;s the MS we all know and love!

There&#x27;s (quite rightly) been a bit of a fuss of late regarding the modular, paired down kernel. Why not offer the features above Home via the app &#x2F; business store? CAL can still work. Then you have Windows, Windows Mobile and IoT?<p>one presumes inertia and marketing are the biggest drivers behind these editions.

No mention of Windows 10 IoT? Is it still going to live in some weird licensing limbo zone where it&#x27;s only for preview and not for normal people to buy and use?<p>edit: Oh geeze I missed it, it&#x27;s appparently part of &#x27;Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise&#x27;... seriously?

There was an earlier impression (desire?) that Windows 10 was going to do away with this marketing mess of a bazillion different versions. Yet in reality, nothing has changed. All this blog post is doing differently is finally explaining what each version is.

So if Windows 10 home and pro are both free upgrades, why are they separate? I get the rest is so they can call their mobile OS the same as they call their desktop OS and segmenting enterprise, but why the home&#x2F;pro distinction?

This is not granular enough. I wonder if the following features are still missing from Windows 10 pro<p>1. Multi monitor support in RDP<p>2. Support for mounting NFS mounts<p>Of course as in the past the compare windows editions will omit important actual differences like these.

I don&#x27;t get it - can you upgrade a Windows 8.1 standard to Win10 Pro?

Unfortunately this kind of complexity isn&#x27;t just questionable marketing, it propagates to everything else. It makes seamless user experiences needlessly difficult.<p>For example, imagine trying to create a supporting product, or simply writing <i>instructions</i> on how to do something. You&#x27;re trying to make sure that the user will see what they&#x27;re supposed to see but with all these versions you can&#x27;t <i>assume</i> anything so you have to consider <i>everything</i>. A simple list of bullets suddenly becomes a series of &quot;if you have X, do Y&quot; statements. Everywhere.<p>When products and companies become this big, a simple and arbitrary choice is all it takes to create unnecessary costs for thousands of organizations around the world.

Blech, this is not sexy marketing. How do you do a press announcement with no pictures of said greatness? Its pretty pointless to describe your software product with paragraphs.

&gt; We are also bringing the Xbox gaming experience to Windows 10, giving games and gamers access to the Xbox Live gaming community, enabling the capture and share of gameplay and giving Xbox One owners the ability to play their Xbox One games from any Windows 10 PC in their home.<p>I do not like the sound of this. It looks like another attempt at the loathed GWFL (Games For Windows Live)

Hey so what does everyone think of them releasing multiple versions of Windows 10?

They are too focused on the one OS for everything meme. Apple does it better with iOS and MacOS. Yes you will (presumably) be able to run Office across all devices but they&#x27;re not really the same programs on each platform. The UI will still be different because it has to be.

I was expecting to see a gold version for $10,000...

&gt; everything from elevators to ATMs to heart rate monitors to wearables<p>I&#x27;ve never been more frightened in my life. Forget the zombie apocalypse, this is the W10 apocalypse.

Good lord... With all the stride MS has made and they STILL insist on releasing 1 million different versions of Windows... How stupid do you have to be to continue to do this?