Software
Microsoft Broadens Recognizers In Windows 7 to 26, Now Tied to Language Packs
In Windows 7, Microsoft has broadend their recognizers from 12 languages in Vista to 26 languages, which include the following: Norweigian (bokmal & nynorsk), Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Polish, Porgeues (Portugal), Romanian, Serbian (Cryillic & Latin), Catalan, Russian, Czech, and Croatian. Non-English Windows 7 will get their language recognizer, plus English.
The recognizers are currently a standard part of Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, and Vista Ultimate. In Windows 7, however, additional recognizers will only be available via the Language Pack, which is only available in Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise. The main reason for this move was to reclaim diskspace that the recognizers took.
This will be particularly troublesome for those cultures where multiple languages are the norm (Australia, France, etc), and the education space. Tablet PC users now wanting to do recognition beyond English or their own language + English will now have to purchase Windows 7 Ultimate, which is quite a high cost to pay to just get additional recognition support. Now, the parent buying a tablet pc for their student will now need to factor in an upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate rather than just staying at Windows 7 Home Premium.
Rather than tying recognizers to the Language Pack, I would suggest creating a Recognizer Pack download and making that a free Windows Update download for Windows 7 Premium owners.
I’m curious as to how many GottaBeMobile.com readers this will impact?
Medic
03/02/2009 at 3:38 pm
If Dutch is added, you would have my vote for an impact.
Loni
03/02/2009 at 4:38 pm
It definitely will make a huge impact for me if Swedish is included.
I will have to consider buying Ultimate because this will bring another great usage to my tablet.
blash
03/02/2009 at 4:53 pm
Still no Hebrew :(
I end up buying the Ultimate edition anyways though.
Rob Bushway
03/02/2009 at 5:07 pm
Dutch is already in Vista. So that means you’ll now only get Dutch and English recognizers if Dutch is your primary language when buying Windows 7; whereas in Vista, you had all the recognizers for free under all the premium skus. Any recognizers above that will require Windows 7 Ultimate
Rob Bushway
03/02/2009 at 6:11 pm
@loni – Swedish isincluded in that too, so you’ll need to upgrade to Windows 7 ultimate to get Swedish recognition support if English is your base Windows 7 language. In Vista, you wouldn’t have needed to upgrade to Ultimate to get that additional recognizer support.
Kahm
03/02/2009 at 8:19 pm
This will absolutely affect me. I’m studying Japanese and I install the Japanese recognition stuff on my desktop and tablet. The first thing I did after putting windows 7 on my HP tx2000 was track down the recognition packs. It’s very troubling to me that Microsoft would tie it’s language packs to price-premium products.
The only feature of the Ultimate version that I use over the Premium version is the Japanese MUI :(
Mark Payton
03/02/2009 at 10:05 pm
Still waiting (along with many of our teachers) for Arabic.
Klas
03/03/2009 at 4:35 am
Finally! I’ve been waiting for Swedish for years now.
Philip Seyfi
03/03/2009 at 4:59 am
Nice to hear that they added support for Russian & Czech!
JC
03/03/2009 at 5:17 am
That’s unfortunate. I ink in both English and Chinese. I suppose this is one way of pushing people towards Ultimate. (However, relative to the complete group of potential Win7 buyers, I doubt this affects many people.)
borax99 (Alain C.)
03/03/2009 at 6:08 am
It will affect me if the recognizer doesn’t work in English *and* French – I’m in Canada
Marc Vallribera
03/04/2009 at 2:16 am
In my opinion it’s very bad to have the language pack and recognizers available only in Windows 7 Ultimate. This way, if I want to use a Netbook (or a “Netvertible” like the Asus T91) in my own language (Catalan) I’ll have to spend twice the amount of money (Netbook + upgrade to Ultimate). That is unacceptable (in my opinion).
I think the same as you with the suggestion to have it as an additional download, like today’s Language Packs in Windows Vista.
Marc
Snowii
03/04/2009 at 3:41 am
will affect me!
looking forward to start writing in Czech :)
but additional packets would surely be a better way to provide those than the pure money-oriented approach of “get the most expensive”… bottom line this will just make more people reluctant (of couse some’ll go for Ultimate anyways…) and instead of enjoying this feature they won’t simply have it for as many languages as they’d wish for…
great example is us students – Czech + English will work every version… but when I am studying German and Spanish as well I am kinda in a bad position here :(
Ben
03/05/2009 at 4:25 pm
This is stupid. I never did understand why MS always makes a different ‘version’ of Windows for each language. They should just make 1 version, then let you add whatever and however many languages you want simply by downloading additional and FREE language packs. Windows in English or Windows in Japanese or anything is still the same WINDOWS, only the text strings used in the UI are different.