Windows Ultimate Extras

~ the last words ~

vista ultimate had a strange presence in turkey. it turned up on far more machines than its price could explain, because the install media going around in 2007 tended to be whatever edition unlocked everything, and almost nobody in my orbit had handed microsoft $399 for it. so a lot of us were technically ultimate customers with an entitlement to a benefits program we were never going to check on.

i was at university then, ttnet at home since 2006, and vista was the thing you argued about on donanimhaber rather than the thing you enjoyed using. it wanted more ram than anyone had. the extras were a footnote inside a release that already had bigger problems.

the pitch was straightforward. vista shipped in six editions and ultimate was the top of the stack, priced at $399 for a full retail copy against $239 for home premium. the technical difference was thin, mostly bitlocker plus the business features, so microsoft attached a promise: ultimate extras, described as cutting-edge programs and services delivered through windows update, exclusive to the people who paid the most. barry goffe, who ran windows ultimate, said the goal was to delight the customers who bought the most expensive edition.

~ the record ~

~ what actually shipped ~

nine things, over almost three years. bitlocker drive preparation and secure online key backup, both genuinely useful and both plainly features that belonged in the operating system anyway. windows hold 'em, a texas hold 'em game. thirty-five multilingual user interface language packs, delivered in two batches over ten months. three windows sound schemes, in april 2008. microsoft tinker, a puzzle game about a robot, in september 2008. and dreamscene.

dreamscene is the one anyone remembers. it played a looping video file as your desktop wallpaper, which was pure spectacle and cost you a constant slice of gpu and battery. announced at launch, it slipped twice and left beta on september 25, 2007, eight months after people had paid for the edition that entitled them to it. by july 2007 the delays were loud enough that goffe posted a public apology for the silence and then announced another delay in the same breath.

~ what got buried with it ~

the word that did the damage was frequent. microsoft had promised a stream and delivered a trickle, and every month without an extra made the price gap look worse in retrospect. ed bott later called it probably the biggest mistake microsoft made with vista, which sounds extreme for a poker game until you consider that ultimate was the halo product and the extras were the entire argument for buying it.

windows 7 arrived on october 22, 2009 with an ultimate edition and no extras program attached to it. upgrading from vista removed whatever extras you had installed, dreamscene included, and nothing replaced them. the interesting part is that microsoft never really tried the shape again. every premium windows tier since has been sold on features present in the box on day one, not on a subscription to future generosity. the lesson stuck even if the product did not.

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