It’s a great idea up front, but support and consumer confusion and perception would be a nightmare on the back. People were freaking out when Microsoft castrated XP to make XP Home. They’d hear some tip and find out it didn’t work on their machines. They didn’t like that. Support has to ask you which version you’re running, and most people don’t even know that. It’s just what came with their computer.
Disk space is cheap and it doesn’t cost them a penny more to manufacture Ultimate vs. Home Basic. Just ship the whole thing like Apple does. This splitting up is for company profit, not for customer satisfaction.
I very disagree. Windows is perhaps 50% slower for the overhead programs never used by the majority of consumers. Most everyone would be able to select from a dozen home “packages” based on their interests, just for home use alone. The legacy programs alone are just bloat for 99.9% of users.
How many consumers would opt for annoyances like DRM? Some would. Most of us would not. And there are a hundred other things that just suck down clock ticks. It’s not storage space that’s the problem.