by Ed Bott
October 10th, 2008 @ 10:23 am

Ask any Windows pundit about all the different editions of Windows Vista that Microsoft offers and you’ll invariably get the same response. There are too many! Consumers are confused! It all needs to be simplified!

To which I say: Be careful what you wish for. The case for reducing the number of Windows editions to one or two sounds convincing in the abstract, but the argument breaks down quickly once you start to examine the details and consider how such a change would affect the way you and I buy Windows on consumer and business PCs. In fact, if Microsoft were to try, it would have a devastating effect on the low end of the market.

The latest to jump on the too-many-versions bandwagon is my friend and ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. After tweaking me for “sweating the small stuff,” in my conjecture about what Windows 7 will ultimately be called, he writes that he’s “far more interested in how many different flavors of the OS we can expect to have to deal with.“

And like so many others who write on this topic, he proposes a simple solution: Now, ideally I’d like to see Microsoft return to a situation where there’s one consumer and one professional flavor of Windows. In fact, why not take it a step further and adopt the Mac approach and go with a single version.