Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Vista Ultimate & Marketing Falsehoods

I was checking out an HP desktop computer because my latest Media Center computer upgrade is giving me a headache (more on that later today if I can manage to write about it), and I saw something that really frustrated me. It's not the first time I've seen it, but it's certainly one of the more glaring examples of it that I've seen:

That text is, for the most part, completely false. HP charges $190 USD extra to go from Vista Home Premium to Vista Ultimate. And if you were an average consume you might read that text and think "Yeah, ok, those things sound good, I'd better get Vista Ultimate." The problem is, that would be completely wrong. Let's break it down point by point:

• "New Look"? FALSE. Vista Ultimate has exactly the same look as Home Premium.
• "Instant Search"? FALSE. Vista Ultimate has exactly the same instant search features as Home Premium.
• "Built-in Windows Media Center"? FALSE. Vista Ultimate has exactly the same version of Windows Media Center as Home Premium does.
• "Automated Security Features"? FALSE. I can't think of a single automated security feature that Ultimate has that Premium lacks.
  

What should the differences be listed as? Faxing capabilities, Bitlocker Drive Encryption, and Remote Desktop. That's pretty much it. Consumers very likely wouldn't care about the first two, and the third is a power user feature that someone like myself uses - but hardly worthy of paying $190 for when there are free alternatives. Windows Vista Ultimate promised to be the "power user" version of Windows Vista, something that geeks would want because it would allow them to do more. Instead, Ultimate Extras turned out to be a sham - nothing they've released to date, even taken together, is worth the price of admission.

I can't blame Microsoft for the inaccuracies in the above text - it was likely written by an HP person who decided to falsify the features in Vista Ultimate in order to sell copies of Vista Ultimate and bump up the sell-through price of online orders. Microsoft should pull Vista Ultimate from the marketplace immediately, because if an OEM partner can't accurately define the additional features of Vista Ultimate, that's a pretty good indication that there aren't any worthy of having a completely different version of Vista. I believe Windows Vista is the best version of Windows that has ever been released, and I use it on the majority of my systems, but releasing Windows Vista Ultimate was a mistake and Microsoft should take steps to correct that mistake.