Windows 7 could follow Vista to an early grave
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
I think Windows 7 will be a success, and Vista will be remembered much as Windows ME has been, as a short lived inferior product that nobody wanted.
If MS had just shipped without the nag screens and with a lightweight desktop theme, I think the reception would have been very different. That's not to say that it's the best OS, but it could have been a business success.
The tiny effect of the UAC being enabled by default has, in my opinion, snowballed to destroy Microsoft's reputation and profits. A one bit difference in the OS will hurt their bottom line for years to come.
Have you looked at MSFT's profits recently? http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/10k_fh_fin.html
If that's what happens to the company in one of the worst economies in decades, and they have an OS that has been repeatedly panned.... Wow. I wonder what the company is going to do when the economy does well.
But decent compared to what? Windows 2000?
The background indexing was also a disaster. What an idea. Make my new computer useless for several days so that some searches that I'll never do will be faster.
The difference here is that when I got some new PC's with vista, it was so quirky that we had to bust them all back to XP to get them to be usable. (It should not take 25 minutes to copy 12 meg onto a thumb drive).
If new PC's came with the current windows 7, I'd shrug and say "good enough" and not think about it again. At mircosoft's market share, that's a win.
I think it's got the best of Vista and XP and less of the garbage we hate. I think it will be successful if Microsoft can pull off a good marketing campaign. The difference between IT departments upgrading to Vista or upgrading to Windows 7 is that Win7 will actually run fairly well on their old hardware.
7 scales down like Vista never did. I installed the beta on a 4-year-old TabletPC with .5GB RAM, and it runs as well as XP ever did. I'll probably upgrade my dev workstation when the RC is released.
I did have some stability problems right after the install: One of my two video cards was a PCI graphics card that was over 4 years old, and NVidia isn't making 64bit Win7 drivers for it. So, after a quick trip to Fry's, I updated the most recent NVidia drivers, and I'm golden.
The OS seems beautiful and well thought out. It's nice to see MSFT get a little religion about design. It ships with a lovely command line/scripting language called PowerShell 2. I've been using Powershell 1.0 for a year or two, and I'm really happy with the updates. The integrated Powershell IDE is actually quite nice.
Did I mention that the OS was free? MSFT's Bizspark program for startups lets you have access to almost all MSFT's software library for 3 years at a cost of $100 at the end of the program.
It actually makes me think about doing Windows desktop development using IronPython + .NET. At very least, I'm definitely going a desktop widget for my web app.
Some reviews of Windows 7 have been very positive, some have been negative, but only time will really tell how well it will fare. Microsoft should be looking at ways to avoid the missteps of Vista and its adoption, but to say that IT departments can hold out forever on XP, or to think they will mass adopt Mac or Linux is less likely than the prognosticators will care to admit.
For MS' sake, it surely can't fail, though like XP before it, the full acceptance may be a year or two coming. I remember when XP was banned from our Schlumberger LANs because it could do its own routing. All that was soon forgotten though.