chuyskywalker wrote:
True, the problem isn't so much that there are different ways you can purchase the OS, it's that it comes in X,Y,and Z setup and only those setups.
In order to satisfy everyone, you could have a single distrobution which has everything. OR you could have a modular distrubution which you can fully customize. Want high end graphics and touchscreen, but those. Want that with business tools to? Done.
However, the way MS has gone about it for Vista/XP/etc is somewhere in the awkward middle. They create tons and tons of different pre-set feature sets. The problem with this is that no setup (usually) matches exactly what you need. The most common complaint with Vista was "Well, I would be happy with X version, but I just need feature Y from version Z" or "I had to buy the more expensive version for feature Y, but now I have all this other stuff I don't need."
Going down this road with more and more preordained setups also adds complexity to the original purchasing decision (a lot of it) because with each extra pre-set feature list you have one more contender in the field of "not quite right" lists.
Eventually, it has to lead to a "add the components you need" OS which probably comes in a few recommended default (ie: home, business, ultimate) and you can add/remove OS features from there. I doubt that will be Win7 though.
Microsoft neither would nor could do OS modularity in anything other than the coarsest of implementations. Customisation adds complexity, and in a system as interdependent as an OS, modularity and package management
always brings with it dependency issues and software version incompatabilities between interdependent applications. The best you can hope for is to make these as few as possible, but even the best package manager will fail at some point, and user intervention outside of package management systems could kill the system completely.
In short, granular modularity is
hell to support, and one thing people often forget is that Microsoft has to provide support to all their retail sales, and OEMs have to provide support for the operating systems on the machines that they sell on to customers. The entire cost structure would be whacked out of place by many-fold increases in support requests.
When you have a system with an installed base of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of copies, sold to users who have little to no understanding of how the system works, the only feasible way to manage it is to either not provide general support for it, to charge obscene amounts for support, or to streamline the system as much as practically possible, the latter being preferred for average personal users.
Last edited by mikkel (2009-01-11 06:36:07)
