What the Vista Suit Means for Windows 7 Netbooks

Revelations about the "Junk PC" scheme in which Microsoft allowed PCs to be sold as "Vista Capable" even though they couldn't run all the features of Vista make one wonder: What will happen when Windows 7 netbooks hit the market? Will they run all of Windows 7's features, or be partially crippled, as were the "Vista Capable" PCs?

My guess is that Windows 7 netbooks will be fully capable of running all of Windows 7's features. Microsoft has gotten terrible publicity about its "Vista Capable" scheme. The documents in the lawsuit show that Microsoft caved into Intel pressure to launch the scheme, and that HP was furious about the decision.

Microsoft doesn't want similar publicity in the future -- or another lawsuit. This is particularly important when it comes to netbooks, because an estimated 30% of netbooks run Linux. If Microsoft brings out a less-than-full version of Windows 7 on them, it will only make more people choose Linux. And as I've written about in a previous blog, Microsoft is worried that if people get used to Linux on netbooks, they may consider buying it for a desktop PC as well. So the netbook market is too important to gamble with.

In fact, Microsoft has already come out publicly and said that netbooks will run the full version of Windows 7. At the WinHEC keynote address on November 5, Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President of Windows and Windows Live, showed off Windows 7 on an ASUS Eee PC. Here's what he said about the machine, and Windows 7:

This one is a 1 gigabyte ram, 16 gig SSD, it's got an Atom dual-core chip in it, 1.6 gigahertz, and it's running full Windows. So you don't have to go down-level, you don't need anything stripped down, this is a full Windows experience on this PC.

He seems to say it pretty clearly -- nothing stripped down, with the "full Windows experience" on a netbook. (By the way, you can read a transcript of the full keynote, here.)

I think Sinofsky's playing straight -- if Microsoft releases a stripped-down version of Windows 7 for netbooks, it could be disastrous, and I think the company knows that.