Rumors and headlines are flying all over the web about Windows 7. But how will Windows affect you and Microsoft? Let’s discuss the tremendous importance of this milestone, that could ultimately prove to ‘make or break’ Microsoft.
Windows 7 mock-up from xazac.
Deconstructing the marketing
In the eve of PDC(Professional Developers Conference), a lot of people are starting to talk about Windows 7: features, release dates, and of course deciphering Steve Ballmer’s comments.
It appears that Microsoft is taking the Apple approach – creating hype and expectations, columns on major publications and flame wars on forums.
They’re keeping the tech world on its toes, not a good thing to do if you don’t have something worthwhile coming out:
Customers are prepared to walk if you don’t deliver when you promise. So, in order to meet these demands, for the last 20 years or so, we’ve all been applying the mantra: “Under Promise & Over Deliver”.
Their current strategy would indicate that they’re going to launch something pretty impressive. Of course, if they don’t deliver (aka Vista), the first to be disappointed are the nerds and tech journalists, both with huge influence on the mainstream users.
They’re doing the same mistakes over and over again.
Windows 7: More than an operating system
Windows 7 is more than an operating system, its a 3-5 year strategy that affects billions of dollars of revenue, millions of people and companies around the world. It represents the lion share cut of Microsoft’s revenue.
Just imagine what would happen if people just stopped buying new versions of Windows. Profits would collapse and the huge costs of running such a big corporation would bring the balance to red fast.
Courtesy of ZDNET
In many ways this phenomenon has already started. A lot of people, myself included, are running the same copy of Windows XP they bought back in 2002, over 5 years ago.
And even with its huge marketing campaigns and deals with manufacturers people downgrade to XP because it’s faster, less bloated (700MB CD – 4,7GB DVD) and less bling-bling style. Why would I want to run Photoshop slower? Or wait 2 minutes for the system to start up?
Features such as 3D rendering of the desktop are nice from a technological standpoint, but not very useful. This kind of feature-creep should be avoided for Windows 7 – and instead try to make it as lightweight as possible and let the users chose the features they want at installation.
Bottom line
People don’t care about Microsoft’s profits – if Windows 7 proves to be a flop, they will just stick with XP for a while longer. And, considering the tremendous efforts from both Apple and Canonical, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if more and more people bought Apple computers and PC’s with Linux preinstalled.
Microsoft is not going to go away soon – they sit on very large pile of cash – and in a worst case scenario they’ll become an IBM-type company.
While the demise of Windows may bring some smiles to the open source community and Steve Jobs, it will actually be a loss for the consumers: basic economics tell us that the more competition, the lower prices and better quality of the products.
Let’s hear it in the comments: What do you think about Windows 7 and the future of Microsoft? How would it affect you personally?
The problem with Microsoft’s approach is that they are concentrating on features that Microsoft wants, not what the user wants. Features like DRM, Windows-only technologies that break on other OS’es.
Microsoft is still too focused on destroying other OSes, instead of improving their own OS.
I will bet you that, once again, corporate bureaucracy will ruin this version of Windows just like it did with Vista.
Windows had an interesting experimental OS in the works. I think it was called Midori. From the sounds of it, this was the way to go. If they went with that I think they’d have a winner.
Sorry for that outage earlier, one of the databases crashed because of the huge demand-Digg and StumbleUpon. Everything should be back to normal.
“For businesses with 100+ PC’s i know know of a couple that are running Vista at the moment. Most are waiting until all there hardware is up above the sweet spot so that they don’t have to support a mixed environment.”
That’s the case for our company (1000s of PCs in our case), but it will be years before we’ve upgraded all the boxes to the point where they could comfortably support Vista, and honestly there is no compelling reason to upgrade hardware for the OS… it doesn’t allow us to do anything we can’t already do.
We currently have no time frame to move to Vista. I spoke with a coworker at my previous employer (another Fortune 500, with 1000s of PCs) and they are in the same place.
From a business perspective Vista really didn’t bring anything to the table. I’ve seen some people argue security, but I can only assume those are small shops that aren’t able to lockdown their XP installs well enough. We’ve never had that problem.
It’s too bad Vista got such a bad rap. I use Vista and don’t want to go back to XP cause it looks so old compared to Vista.
It seems like the four major complaints about Vista are this:
1. It requires as much memory as basic computers come with these days (1 gigabyte)
2. It has a new driver model that requires new drivers to be written (and most have)
3. It asks me to click “Allow” whenever a program need administrator access.
4. It’s different to XP.
Microsoft has said that Windows 7 will have very similar system requirements as Vista, it will have the same driver model that will require Vista-era drivers, and it will still have User Account Control. And, of course, it will be different to XP. Am I missing something? Why are people waiting enthusiastically for Windows 7?
Dave Kerr: What are they doing that is trying to distroy other OS’s?
Walter: Sadly most large shops work on a 5year’ish cycle. So its often one OS upgrade maybe every 5 years (how long after a OS comes out before all the computers are able to run it?). I know of business that only moved to XP from 2000 2years ago.
Have a read of http://port25.technet.com/
All I really see here is whining about the superficial aspects of Microsoft. As a senior IT consultant I see that they have given us VS2008, WPF, WCF, WWF, PowerShell, Dynamic Data, F#, MOSS 2007 and MVC in a rather short period. Personally, I see this as an exciting period to work in as a Microsoft developer. The bottom line is that businesses and business developers now have many new tools at their disposal. I’m using Dynamic Data as the administrative CRUD tool for a current project and it has saved me an enormous amount of time. I accomplished in a day what would have taken weeks.
BTW – I got my start as a UNIX/Java/Perl/Apache developer. There is no way I would ever go back. Yes, they have their strengths and Microsoft does copy from them (PowerShell), but I think Microsoft still has an incredibly talented pool of minds creating innovative products for both developers and end users.
means a lot of crap, and wasted years of coding
where is the change ? will take 20 GB of my space ? and 4 GB RAM?
cmon, for what ?
Keeping my hopes high for PDC Conference – more details should come out then. BTW, Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott from TWiT are going to cover it. It’s on October 26 and should be streaming live via their site.
I would love for them to implement most all of the unix command line features. i see this as a huge advantage to macs for it departments. esp as virtualization software advances.
for me vista has been great, not only is it more flashy than xp it is fast and often realiable. apart from the few incompatibility issues experienced initially, there hasnt been much to worry about. i do however believe that if i installed xp on this machine it would be a lot quicker and smoother. the release of sp1 made vista more stable and increased performance speeds. i quite like the new features in vista nad the grouping and easy access of many features. no doubt it has had some issues when initially realsed but as it begins to get older, there seem to be fewer issues with the os. i cant wait to see what ms comes up with in windows 7, and im looking forward to it. hopefully it will deliver on promises made and be better than expected.
P.S. i am really dissapointed in the outcome on HTG and wish u all the best of luck and fortune in the future.
Did someone just say that XP64 and Vista 64 have the same hardware support ?
If you want to run a modern PC you need Vista 64 -
Want more than 4gb of RAM – Vista 64
Want to use your new fancy graphics card with 1Gb of Ram on board – Vista 64 – otherwise bye bye to some of your system memory
Want to play a DX10 game (Farcry 2 runs faster in DX10 mode BTW) – Vista 32 or 64 but you'd be a moron to get 32.
What amazes me is people talking about install sizes – 750Gb HDD is £65
More amazing is the people who look in task manager and complain that Vista is using their memory. It's called superfetch, it preloads frequently used programs to speed up app launch and yes it works and yes it unloads it if it needs more RAM for a particular app. Also you can buy 4gb of RAM for about £35….
Here's a tip for anyone complaining of boot time – go into your BIOS and make sure S3 or STR is set for the power management. Turn off wake up on mouse / USB. Go into the power management properties in the control panel and change the power button mode to sleep. Say hello to instant on and it uses as much power as your RAM requires. i.e. not much. Typing this on a 3 year old (nearly) vista 64 install.
Also whats all this DRM I hear of in Vista ??? Is that like the DRM in itunes that stopped everyone owning Ipods ?
Is is like all the DRM in every game I buy at the moment ? Is it like the DRM on HDMI connections ? Or the DRM on DVD's ? Or like Macrovision they used to put on VHS tapes to stop you copying them ?
If so what exactly is the purpose of the DRM that Vista is infested with ? does it only allow you to unplug your mouse 5 times before making you buy a new one ?
I just don't understand the statement that vista has more DRM? How, where, for what purpose, surely XP must have it too or the digital content your trying to use would not work…..
Microsoft fixed the issues of Vista and will release Windows 7. I think that all the new features of Windows 7 are for corporates, not for home users. Home users do not require a new operating system, they require that their PC runs without problems. Windows XP is still the best choice for them but here comes the monopoly, all new PCs are sold with the latest version of Windows.
In case Windows 7 is a flop again, Microsoft will definitely try harder to deliver better operating systems. I personally wish that Microsoft stops Windows brand and starts to develop a brand new operating system.