It seems that even Miccrosoft thought that Vista Home Basic wasn't so Vista after all

According to official documents issued on Wednesday by U.S. authorities, it seems that a group within the Microsoft Corporation allegedly suggested back in 2005 that the company should drastically delimitate the various editions of the Windows Vista line-up. Therefore, it has been suggested that the low-end Home Basic version should have the “Vista” label removed and it should be marketed as a different product, in order to associate the name of the then-new operating system with premium features only.

There have been reasons to do that, as the most striking difference between Home Basic and all the other versions was the lack of the Aero interface, which kind of separated Home Basic from the more expensive Home Premium, Business and Ultimate versions.

The information in the document was made public by a federal court yesterday, but the paper issued by the accusers had been filed back in December 8 last year. According to official information, the petitioners accuse Microsoft for misinforming users during the “Vista Capable” marketing campaign that was launched in the few months preceding the commercial release of Windows Vista.

As part of the investigation, the petitioners found an email dated back in August 2005, which contained information about the Vista line-up information. The email contained suggestions from Windows Product Management Group, which advocated that the Home Basic version should not be branded as part of the Windows Vista line-up but instead, it should be marketed as a separate version of Windows itself. In the document, the Group allegedly stated that removing Home Basic as an iteration of Vista and selling it separately would have helped the Redmond giant to deliver the high expectations that people were having regarding the new operating system.

Moreover, the document issued by the complainants also suggests that even big computer manufacturers, known as OEMs, agreed that removing Home Basic from the Vista offering would be the best thing to do. However, even if the document only named Dell as supporting the idea, it is worth noting that the company is the second biggest computer manufacturer worldwide.

The plaintiffs suggested that Windows Home Basic was created specifically for highlighting the more potent versions of the operating system and, therefore, to increase price tags of both the retail versions and of the PCs that came bundled with Vista.

Addressing these accusations, Microsoft stated that the Home Basic version is a full-featured version of Vista regarding essential capabilities. The Redmond giant also added that every company has the right to offer different versions of the same product, choose what feature each version has and set the price tags accordingly.