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Windows Vista Review: Understanding the Vista Product Editions
Friday, November 10th, 2006
Back in 2001, life was easy: Microsoft released Windows XP in just two product editions, Windows
XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition. The difference between the products was fairly obvious, and with its enhanced feature set, XP Pro was the more expensive version, as one might expect. Over time, however, Microsoft muddied the waters with a wealth of new XP product editions. There were three major versions added: Windows XP Media Center Edition (which received three major releases and one minor update between 2002 and 2005), Windows XP Tablet PC Edition (which received two major releases between 2002 and 2005), and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, which took most of XP Pro’s feature set and brought it to the x64 hardware platform. Other XP versions, such as XP Embedded and XP Starter Edition, can’t really be considered mainstream products.
For Windows Vista, Microsoft surveyed the market and come away with two observations. First, an experiment stratifying the Microsoft Office product line into multiple product editions, or SKUs (Stock Keeping Units, a retailing term), had proven enormously successful. Second, customers were willing to pay a bit more for premium product SKUs, such as XP Media Center Edition, that offered extra features. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Microsoft’s experiences over the past few years led directly to the situation we have with Windows Vista: The company has created 6 Vista product editions, two of which can be described as premium versions. Or, if you include the so-called N and K editions (for the European Union and South Korea, respectively), there are actually 9 product editions. Or, if you count the 32-bit and x64 versions separately, there are 17 product editions. Or something.
Don’t get bogged down in semantics or complicated counting exercises. With a little bit of knowledge about how these product editions break down and are sold, you can whittle the list down quite a bit very easily. Then, you can evaluate which features are available in which editions and choose the one that’s right for you based on your needs. Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Windows Vista Review, Part 2: Understanding the Vista Product Editions
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