So the other day regular reader Mike Dimmick asked me:

An article on zdnet's All About Microsoft suggests that MUI packs will only be available on Windows Vista Ultimate and Vista Enterprise.

I probably don't need to tell you that a lot of smaller business users will be using the Vista Business edition, not Enterprise (which needs, I believe, a huge commitment through Software Assurance volume licensing). We ourselves have this edition through the Action Pack scheme. Can you say whether MUI will be available for Windows Vista Business?

I am not going to toe the line and claim that I think this is a sensible idea, and I won't try to be an apologist about it either.

I think it is a terrible idea.

Of course I am not really someone who has done any number crunching on this and I am sure that more than a few people who have done so have been consulted. So I may well be wrong. In fact, I'm probably wrong.

And looking at a bunch of the online sites for buying Vista, even buying single copies the upgrade version of Ultimate is under $260 and of Business is under $200 (the full version of Ultimate is under $400 and of Business is under $300), so I guess it is kind of a tempest in a teacup since the upgrade version can be used to do clean installs if you have qualifying upgrade media. And who among us doesn't have a whole mess of qualifying media? :-)

So while this is something I find annoying, I am not sure how truly blocking it will be.

The whole situation, I am reminded of a scene from the 1988 movie Shoot To Kill:

{Sidney Poitier has just scared away a grizzly bear}

Tom Beringer: I've never seen a  grizzly just turn and run like that.

Sidney Poitier: Everybody else up here acts like they've never seen a black man before. Why should the bear be different?

The way I look at, to date I don't think there has yet been a version of MUI shipped for either Windows or Office that has had a SKU story that I thought made sense. Why should Vista be different? :-)

 

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