Addendum: Six SKUs of Separation
Microsoft is currently planning on six versions of Windows Vista, including two versions of Vista Home.
Gone is an earlier SKU oriented towards
This seems like a bad idea to me, but then I'm not a Microsoft Marketing Genius™. From a developer's perspective, the more I can rely on the target platform to be similar to the development/testing platform, the better. This in turn means that the fewer variations of the overall platform that are out there the better.
(Note: this is one reason why Linux remains such a terrible desktop platform.)
Currently, XP has Home, Media Center Edition, Tablet, Professional, and Server. From a development standpoint, this equates to Home/MCE/Professional, Tablet, and Server. So while the retail picture of XP is pretty complex, from a developer's point of view we have a single, pretty unified, target platform (since a server app is a server app and we probably don't care about Tablet).
But in the new world we have Home Basic and Home Premium which will have different looking GUIs just for starters. So when I write documentation for my users, I'm now going to need to do a lot more work (forget testing, etc.).
