“Oh, the holes I punched in this raincoat? It’s a starter raincoat. Half price.”

Microsoft confirms grossly shortsighted plans to release crippled Windows 7 SKU for netbooks and developing markets.

I don’t mean to hate on MSFT again. In fact, I’m mostly just tired of spending energy, positive or negative, on that behemoth. I’m not alone. I’ve seen even among dedicated Mac-folks an optimism, a rooting-for-ness surrounding Windows 7.  My sense is that those of us in the <10% marketshare crowd take pleasure in the apples-to-oranges aesthetic high-ground, the we-like-macs-because-we-get-it smugness. Vista made that smugness more difficult in a way: If the Microsoft “other” is just objectively crappy (Vista) rather then subjectively inelegant (XP), from where can we claim our cultural grace?.

I, and many others, have been looking forward to Windows 7 succeeding, looking forward to it correcting the overinflated, over-SKUed, errors of Vista. I’ve been running the Windows 7 beta on a `living-room laptop for months, and found it stable, and most of all effectively functional on a slow 3-year-old Centrino laptop. I’ve tried Vista on that same laptop. It wouldn’t even allow me to install it without a couple hacks. And it was unusably slow.

The early hope for Windows 7, aside from necessary stability and compatibility improvements, was that it would a.) ditch the wacky SKUs of Vista – ahem -

• • Windows Vista Starter
  • Windows Vista Ultimate
  • Windows Vista Home Basic
  • Windows Vista Home Premium
  • Windows Vista Business
  • Windows Vista Enterprise
  • Windows Vista Home Basic N
  • and so on

and b.) run well on a wider array of machines, such as the rapidly growing array of netbooks that hit the market in the past year.

The big MSFT news this week: The company made a two-fold announcement confirming what many feared. For one, they verified a Windows 7 Starter SKU – indicating the that consumer will face the same confusing differentiation between Home Basic and Home Premium. That was frustrating, one more sign that the company has not learned as much as many of us hoped from Vista’s failure.  But such thick headed-ness is not surprising from such a massive company. The second part of the announcement, however, confirmed a rumor that I thought insane: That Windows 7 Starter would be have a number of expected features hamstrung, most egregious of them a limitation to running three programs at once. Three programs. In a full-sized OS. In 2009. Crazy.

The mere inconvenience is significant enough as a value proposition for those 1st world folks who might pick up a netbook as a living room laptop to be a bad business move. Especially so after XP had so much success choking out the nascent linux-netbook threat. But what’s really crazy is that Windows 7 Standard is also the OS that Microsoft will be pushing onto the developing world. The corporation of the same man who’s so committed to developing-world issues with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is going to be pushing an artificially crippled, third-rate OS in on that same developing world. The full-featured Windows 7 Home SKU cost no more to develop and distribute than this crappified 7 Starter. All MSFT has done is taken a sledgehammer and scalpel to the OS the West gets, cast key innards into the trash, and is set to sell the remains to the world poorest regions as a “next-generation” OS.

Why would they do this? The obvious answer is so that those folks in poor nations will want to spend US $200 on Windows 7 Home Basic. Obviously unbecomingly greedy of them, but that’s OK, they’re a public company. The real mistake is making this move while desktop linux continues to approach parity in usability and available software . The Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate was released this week, and it looks and runs as well as the Windows 7 Ultimate Beta I’ve been running, and is absolutely free.

Competing with free is hard enough as is, and MSFT is disappointing us all by trying counterproductive shortcuts. They may still win, but they ought not even want to be in the fight in the first place.

Then again, MSFT’s surely spent more on market research then I’ll make in ten lifetimes, and maybe Windows 7 Standard will be a success. But the very idea of offering such a crippled product itself is contemptuous. As Gruber put it,

“They might as well name it “Windows 7: We Hold You in Contempt and Dare You, Fucking Dare You, to Try Something Else Edition”. #