Microsoft expects that a majority of customers will be best served by two primary editions of Windows 7: Windows 7 Home Premium for consumers, and Windows 7 Professional for businesses.

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The first change in Windows 7 was to make sure that editions of Windows 7 are a superset of one another. That is to say, as customers upgrade from one version to the next, they keep all features and functionality from the previous edition. As an example, some business customers using Windows Vista Business wanted the Media Center functionality that is in Windows Vista Home Premium but didn’t receive it in Business edition. Customers won’t have to face that trade-off with Windows 7. With Windows 7 there is a more natural progression from one edition to the next.

With Windows 7 there will be two primary editions: Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Professional. We think those two SKUs will meet most customers’ needs.

For our biggest enterprise customers, we’ll continue to have an Enterprise edition. This edition will not be available at retail or by OEMs for preinstallation on a new PC.

We know emerging markets have unique needs and we will offer Windows 7 Home Basic, only in emerging markets, for customers looking for an entry-point Windows experience on a full-size value PC.

We’ll also continue to offer Windows Starter edition, which will only be offered pre-installed by an OEM.

And certainly there is also a small set of customers who want everything Windows 7 has to offer. So we will continue to have Windows 7 Ultimate edition to meet that specialized need. Windows 7 Ultimate edition is designed for PC enthusiasts who “want it all” and customers who want the security features such as BitLocker found in Windows 7 Enterprise edition.

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While Microsoft executives like to talk about Apple as an insignificant company with less than 5% of the worldwide market share of all PCs and servers sold, the Mac maker now has more cash than Microsoft and earns more than half of its profits and over three fourths its revenues.

For the quarter ending in September, Microsoft released revenues of $15.06 billion, net profits of $4.37 billion, and a reserve of cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments that added up to $20.7 billion.

Apple reported $7.9 billion in revenues and $1.14 billion in net profit, but those numbers don’t include most of its iPhone business, which is hidden away in subscription accounting under GAAP rules. For that reason, Apple also released its real earnings: $11.68 billion in revenue and $2.44 billion in net profits. The company also reported a cash position of $24.5 billion.

Microsoft’s quarterly revenues grew by 9%, compared to Apple’s non-GAAP revenue increase of 75.1% year over year.

via. AppleInsider

Amazon has taken its Elastic Compute Cloud service out of beta status and added Windows to Linux and Solaris on its list of supported operating systems.

The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a service that gives customers on-demand access to Linux servers, is now out of beta testing, said Jeff Barr, evangelist for the collection of online options collectively called Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Amazon EC2 is now in full production,” Barr said in a blog post on Thursday. As promised, EC2 now offers Windows in a beta test, joining Sun’s OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Along with those moves, EC2 now comes with a service-level agreement, a formal commitment that the service will be available at least 99.95 percent of the time. This type of agreement makes it easier for businesses to place faith in the service. Previously, the only AWS component with a service-level agreement was the Simple Storage Service (S3), which provides online data storage.

Customers pay for AWS according to how much they need: more servers, more storage space and more network capacity means more charges. However, unlike with computing infrastructure built in-house, when customers don’t need it anymore, they can stop paying for it. AWS has had outages, but it continues to gain in popularity, and Amazon has been lowering some AWS prices.

Barr also described features, signalling growing sophistication for AWS overall in 2009, that should make it easier to administer AWS, either manually or by letting it run itself better. Barr listed four areas:

• Management console: The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. Users will be able to get a global picture of their cloud-computing environment using a point-and-click web interface
• Load balancing: The load-balancing service will allow users to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances
• Automatic scaling: The auto-scaling service will allow users to grow and shrink their usage of EC2 capacity on demand, based on application requirements
• Cloud monitoring: The cloud-monitoring service will provide real-time, multi-dimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones and time slots

In a separate blog post, Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels described some of the company’s work in ensuring reliability and efficiency.

“We relentlessly measure every possible resource usage parameter, every application counter and every customer’s experience. Many gigabits per second of monitoring data flows continuously through the Amazon networks to make sure that our customers are getting serviced at the levels they can expect and at an efficiency level the business desires,” Vogel said.

Among the customers using the Windows version of EC2 are Autodesk, Render Rocket and Eli Lilly, Amazon said.

“This is a huge step forward in maximising our results relative to IT spend and, now that Amazon EC2 runs Windows and SQL Server, we have even greater flexibility in the kinds of applications we can build in the AWS cloud,” Dave Powers, an Eli Lilly associate information consultant who uses the service to process research data, said in a statement.

Autodesk uses EC2 for back-end data processing tasks, said Mike Haley, the company’s senior architect of search engineering, and Render Rocket uses the service for 3D film and TV graphics work for TV and movies, Amazon said.

via. CNet News

Microsoft has expanded its latest WGA initiative ? you know, the one that turns your computer off screen black every hour ? to China. An guess what! Since the majority of Chinese computer users run unauthorized copies of Windows, they’re kind of upset. Of course, there are plenty of good discussions to be had about how measures like this could affect Microsoft’s image and limit computer access in poorer parts of the world, but one awesome Chinese blogger sees things differently:

If the price of genuine software was lower than the fake one, who would buy the fake one?

Someone should tell Microsoft!

Another Reuters interviewee and noted villainous software thief kind of agreed:

If, when I’m programing, the computer screen goes black, that will probably cause some important information to be lost,” he said. “Who will pay me for my loss then?

Microsoft, after considering the plan to pay software pirates for not knowing how long an hour is, (probably) decided to stick to their guns on this one. Not to mention the fact that the WGA scheme is just nagware ? it won’t cause any data loss.

Dong Zhengwei, a lawyer from Beijing, doesn’t care about that minor detail. However, he offered a more sober opinion on the matter, thoughonly after spending a short paragraph accusing Microsoft of being the “biggest hackers in China:”

I respect the right of Microsoft to protect its intellectual property, but it is taking on the wrong target with wrong measures. They should target producers and sellers of fake software, not users.

All this really means, though, is that we can probably expect a whole new breed of more effective WGA cracks in the next couple weeks.

NOTE: Reuters’ story implies that this software will disable PCs. This is not true, as the new WGA program just prompts users to get a legitimate copy of Windows every 60 minutes. Pretty annoying, but not catostrophic. [Reuters]

via. Gizmodo