Geekomon

Yes. Seven frakkin' versions. While it might seem insane, know this. Their are seven departmental chiefs in Redmond. Their is also a growing need to compete with free or low cost operating systems in countries like China or Africa.

So there's Starter which is their foray into low budget emerging PC world. (They have to offer cheap ass OSes because there's no way China's paying 300 dollars per OS per box.)

2 Versions of Home. Home and Home Premium
A Basic Pro Edition. A Small Business and a Enterprise. More like Plugins
And there's Ultimate, which is the fully featured OS.

Here's the link to the Ars post that talks about Microsoft's new insanity. You should check the comments section too. Lot of Microsoft PR people trolling around.

Come on. You do know why the Apple removed the iPod mini when they introduced the iPod nano, right? I thought Microsoft was supposed to be good in business...

I can understand the Starter Edition. But 2 versions of Home? 3 versions of Professional? And a Extra one called Ultimate? It's one thing to maximize your profits by realizing the price point of multiple target markets, and it's another thing to fragment your market so that they have to buy multiple Windows OSes in order to function.