On Crippleware and Windows 7

A slashdot discussion about Windows 7 brought up an argument I've seen before about market segmentation and product pricing. One of the common objections to such segmentation is the idea of locked features, or crippled versions-- products that are physically identical, but function differently based on the license purchased to go with them.

The argument goes like this: If I buy a cheap car, I get a cheap car. If I buy an expensive car, I get an expensive car. I don't buy a cheap car that actually includes a 12 cylinder engine but only runs on 4 because that's the level of performance I paid for. The analogy then gets extended to software to suggest that there's something wrong with varied pricing tiers for Windows if the physical product, in this case the installation media, is actually capable of installing any version, or, in other cases, the resulting installation actually contains the code necessary for all product features, even if all these product features are not actually functional because of the chosen price tier.

This, of course, is a barmy line of thinking but it's not so obvious to see that it is. As so many times happens on slashdot, the faulty logic is dressed up as a car analogy.

My responses run like this:

Carmakers don't do that because it's not cheaper to do that and because markets wouldn't accept those products. The economies of scale you get by standardizing all of your engine manufacturing on the most capable models are not the same as the economies of scale you get by manufacturing only a single installation media type for an operating system, independent of actual product tiers. For one, there are too many other parts for the car that cannot be arbitrarily restricted in this way (leather seats, bodywork, etc) so the gains are minimal.

Second, even if it was cheaper to manufacture cars that way, this would work against car buyers in ways that the software example doesn't. For one, a 12 cylinder engine operating only on four cylinders would be too heavy and inefficient for the power produced. It would cost the user far too much in fuel to be worth the less expensive purchase price. People buying smaller, cheaper cars also want fuel efficiency, and this scheme doesn't deliver it.

Secondly, think of the tradeoffs that the purchasers of economy versions would suffer due to the inclusion of features that they wouldn't have access to. People who buy expensive sporty convertibles know they might eventually have problems with roof leaks, but they accept this because they like top-down driving. Someone who buys a car that has a convertible roof, but didn't pay for the product tier that enables it to work, still gets the potential for roof leaks, without any benefit. The market would never accept this.

The buyers of less expensive versions of Windows, installing from media that is capable of installing the more expensive versions, suffers no such drawbacks, except perhaps the consumption of additional hard drive space for features not used, and even this is not documented-- it's just as likely that these elements are not installed at all, and are only consuming space on the installation media where they don't bother anyone at all.