"Acer and Intel, for example, are already complaining that Windows 7 Starter Edition simply won't sell."

--Source

Summary: As expected, customers reject Vista 7 Starter Edition and Microsoft is restructuring for coming change

AS we showed earlier this month, Microsoft had been lying about the market share of GNU/Linux in sub-notebooks. Microsoft lies about a lot of things and then repeats the lies over and over again, until both customers and vendors might actually believe these lies, assuming them to be true.

According to this new survey, Microsoft is just trying to "kill" the sub-notebooks market because people who buy sub-notebooks with Vista 7 simply do not like them. Microsoft is to blame for artificial limitations.

It’s no secret the disdain Steve Ballmer and Michael Dell have publicly expressed for netbooks. Both companies make more money from bigger iron running bigger versions of Windows.

[...]

Retrevo was not surprised to discover that 61% of consumers intending to buy a netbook computer were not aware of limitations in Windows 7 Starter Edition. When Retrevo pointed out the differences 56% of those respondents said they would not be satisfied if their new netbook came with Windows 7 Starter Edition.

Another bit of coverage states that "Windows 7 Won’t Support ARM Processors Anytime Soon [Microsoft Still Plays Ball with Intel, Forgets About ARM CPUs]."

What’s interesting is that ARM processors are already used extensively in consumer electronics, and that includes PDAs, mobile phones, digital media, music players, and many more other, but still not getting any Microsoft love right now, which could be because the company is more focused on desktop computers, laptops and netbooks as their main market.

As our reader Ryan points out, "Windows 7 Starter sucks so bad that even Windows “evangelists” are running for cover."

More coverage on the subject includes sources like Jupitermedia and USA Today.

With some 1,100 consumers responding, the non-scientific survey found that 56 percent said they'd be dissatisfied if a new netbook came with Starter Edition, the lowest-end edition of the new Windows 7 operating system.

 

-- Only 42% of respondents were aware that Windows 7 Starter Edition lacks key features, such as the "Aero skin" feature that enables the user to translucently stack open programs.

-- About 54% of respondents said they would be unsatisfied with a new netbook equipped with Windows 7 Starter Edition.

Microsoft-oriented reporters (pro-Microsoft, for the sake of their careers) have covered this too, but some are attempting to spin it.

It is interesting to note that other Microsoft-oriented reporters have complaints about Microsoft, including the fact that Microsoft is shifting to countries where workers are paid less and/or work a lot more [1, 2]. For instance, while Microsoft fires massively in the US and the UK, it is still hiring more people in India. There is nothing wrong with India, there is something wrong with pay and workers' rights.

Venkatesan said the company hired a few hundred people last year in India, where it employs 5,300.

Microsoft is now restructuring and preparing itself for lower margins, which is an inevitability that a move towards cheap(er) computing will bring. ARM has sold over 10 billion processors, so Intel too is frantically working on Atom and it was caught colluding with Microsoft [1, 2], which is a criminal offence, if convicted. The next post will look more closely at Intel, whose offences do not receive sufficient attention. ⬆