But did Microsoft come through with a stable computing platform, with decent hardware requirements and a hardened security model? The definite answer is yes. I’ve been running Windows 7 on my laptop for over a month, installed all the applications I’d normally use – iTunes, Office, Firefox, Mozy – and they all worked fine, without any compatibility settings or whatnot.

While my computer is far from being state of the art, it is able to run Firefox, iTunes, Word and Photoshop at the same time, with decent speed. On just 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a 2,2Ghz AMD Turion 62 single core processor. The visual effects are fluid on a two year old ATi X200M graphics chipset with just 64MB of RAM. What they did under the hood, optimizing the code to run faster, is simply amazing. Running Vista on this laptop was like swimming with cement boots, even with the visual effects turned off.

A very important aspect for Windows users, security, has also been addressed in many ways, and while most of the technologies were present in Vista, they have been improved in Windows 7. The UAC (User Access Control) dialogs are less frequent and not so annoying, executables are scanned for digital signatures of their vendor, you are notified about files downloaded from the internet as well as an improved firewall and notification center. DEP (Data Execution Prevention) is enabled by default, we still have the KPP (Kernel Patch Protection) and a significantly improved Autorun. Also, the privilege level of your account is not root, which would grant you unlimited access to system resources, but a member of the Administrators group. To affect changes that may affect system integrity and security you have to accept an UAC prompt. In addition to this, all start-up items that access critical system areas are also required to be manually approved via an UAC prompt. Checks and flags are implemented all around, to the point that you would have to ignore multiple security warnings in order to get infected. These are all significant changes from Windows XP. All around, you can see that the engineers have dedicated a significant amount of time to securing the operating system.

From such an important aspect as security,we go on to examine the improvements in the user interface department. The taskbar, part Mac OS X dock, part Start menu is an elegant and comprehensive UI element. The functionality offered is simply amazing; We have quick access to commonly used applications, an amazing way to find the window you’re looking for with Quick Look, a streamlined notification area which is clean yet retains usability and instant search from the Start menu. I’m sorry to disappoint the Linux and Mac OS fans, but Windows 7, as it is today, has the most advanced and usable UI.

With Windows 7 Microsoft has changed the game. I for one was saving money for a MacBook, which from a Windows XP viewpoint is an incredible upgrade. But compared to Windows 7, not so much. We have performance, stability, a not too shabby security model, an incredible selection of hardware and software. If lastly, we consider the price – free until June next year – we have an incredibly attractive offer. The ball is at Apple and the pitch is going down at WWDC. Unless something amazing comes out, it’s going to be a homerun for Windows 7.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think about this topic. You can check out How To Install Windows 7 on a Virtual Machine with VirtualBox and Test Windows 7 RC on a Virtual Machine written by Guy McDowell.

PR and the supposed ‘leak’

It should be clear to all of us that these versions floating around various torrent sites – and especially the beta 1 – are carefully planned by public relations. And it’s brilliant. Why?

• Because they reach their target audience, people with tech skills who are still enthusiastic about Windows and are taking time to download, install and test the operating system. Most of them have blogs and will surely post something about it and creating hype for the next release.
• Zero distribution costs via peer-to-peer networks; no responsibility for download speed or failures.
• Press coverage on all the major blogs with little adverse consequences; even if the review is negative – the release is not official.
• A large, no-consequences, zero logistics, no expense beta test; Judging by ThePirateBay seeder/leecher ratio and the time of upload, more than 30 000 tech savvy people are running Windows 7 beta 1 right now and probably submitting bugs, crash reports and hardware information.
• Frameworks inside Windows 7 allow remote deactivation or ‘crippling’ via de WGA scheme. Your copy of Windows 7 works because Microsoft lets you. And they know a new machine is online the minute Windows connects to the internet.

And there are probably even more reasons why Microsoft with its PR firm decided to test-run the beta code.

‘Think alike’ or ‘Think different’

People are fast to say ‘Windows Hater’ or  ‘Apple Fanboy’. That’s because we like to judge and not be judged. And another thing, somebody should call Obama and tell him that Windows needs Change and Innovation, not merely a copy machine. Really.

I’m been a long time Windows user and still use Windows XP for publishing and testing applications; the rest of the time I use various linux flavours (Linux Mint right now). The reasons behind my choice are  simple and straightforward: security, stability, performance and low-cost(99% of software for linux is free and has enough features to be usable on a day to day basis). Spending at least a couple hundred dollars every year or so on new licenses and upgrades isn’t appealing, especially in these times).

Watching the development for the past few years, I’ve noticed myself a trend within the UI team. Frankly, they’re trying to hard to emulate as much of the Mac OS interface as possible. As I see it now, the only thing left for them to do is the Finder.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing; the Windows version of the Dock is in some aspects better than its Mac counterpart – the Live Preview feature allows you to quickly see what window you want to open.

The ‘fire up your copiers’ mantra has brought a slew of small improvements, but mostly we’re enjoying features Mac OS X has had for years; which brings up the question: Why wouldn’t you want to get these feature directly from the innovator? Most will say price, and Apple products are notorious for being expensive. Leo Laporte, the host of the TWIT podcast network, said in a ‘This Week in Tech’ show:

[The Mac] is like the BMW of computers.

In previous versions of Windows we had to jump through hoops in order to connect to a wireless network. In a beta version of Microsoft’s latest operating system we have a feature implemented by Apple back in 2005 – with it’s Mac OS X Tiger release. The list continues with Sharing, Control Panel UI breadcrumb navigation and many other small things like instant search from the desktop(or Spotlight).

And I’m not the only one fighting this battle; this issue has been brought to attention by many other respected journalists such as David Pogue and Paul Thurrott.

Under the Hood

Leaving the UI ‘bling’ aside, Microsoft has done some work under the hood – it feels snappier than Vista and is in the ballpark with Windows XP. The boot-up time is also slightly reduced – 8 seconds faster than XP on average.

Like any ‘old-timer’ will tell you, Windows machines slow down over time as cruft accumulates, even if you pay attention to applications and disk cleanup/defragmentation. Therefore, comparing it after just 3 days of use isn’t exactly fair to the 6 month old XP SP3.

Aside from subjective ‘feeling’ I can’t relate in an article exact code improvements – and it wouldn’t be much fun either. The bottom line is that you’re not going to see a revolution – and instead just a slight evolution over Vista. It seems to me that they made just the necessary changes to accommodate the advent of netbooks and future touchscreen devices.

• Improvements to the user interface; notably the transformed taskbar and various small changes throughout the system.
• Slightly reduced installation footprint; even the installation disc is smaller 2.75Gb to 2.44Gb for the x86 version; the same hardware requirements as Vista, 40Gb hard drive and 1Ghz CPU.
• An improved bootloader which handles out of the box multiple windows operating systems on the same machine.
• Smart folders feature, which gathers photos, music and other kinds of data without needing to manually move them. No new filesystem, however. WinFS is now a separate project and there no indication that it will be integrated in Windows soon.

Conclusion

While this article certainly started as a review of Microsoft’s work for the past couple years, it ended as a rant towards their attitude. While copying features from competitors is the way industry works in general, a big company like Microsoft with its huge Research and Development budgets should be expected to innovate not merely copy from  a smaller competitor.

Look how many things we’re using from the last PDC!*

*Paul Thurrott on This Week in Tech podcast; Profesional Developers Conference – microsoftpdc.com;

For me, Windows 7 is an even bigger disappointment than Windows Vista; admittedly had its faults but was a little more focused on implementing new security procedures and creating various frameworks for later development.

Windows 7 is sadly just a marketing ploy, with little added value from Vista and which certainly won’t urge people to fork 200$ per computer.

I’d really appreciate hearing from our readers how they feel about Windows development, their hopes and if they plant to jump ship to linux or Mac when they buy their next computer.

Familiar?

Apple’s recipe for success was simple, a top down approach: the device, the software, the place to get music, and the (demonic?) scheme to tie all these together- FairPlay DRM. Microsoft, rather  unsuccessfully copied that recipe a little later, and called it Zune. Even if more than 85% of PCs use Windows, Zune’s music player  market share is only 4% compared to iPod’s crushing 70%.

As expected,  there are three components in the Zune’s platform: the Zune player, the Zune Windows-only software and the Zune online services: Zune Marketplace and Zune Social. Oh, and let’s not forget the the Zune DRM. In this article I will take a look at Zune Software and Zune Marketplace. We’ll review the Zune hardware in a separate article later on, if possible.

Quick overview

Zune Software runs on XP and Vista and it is build on a variation of the Media Center UI Framework, and not WPF, as Microsoft probably wanted to eliminate the burden of installing the .NET 3.0 framework. A good choice.

The Zune software is a media player application that can be used to manage a Zune and stream content to a nearby XBOX 360. It supports MP3, AAC(.aac, .mp4, .m4a, .m4b, .mov), WMA for audio and MPEG4 ( .mp4, .m4v, .mov), H.264, WMV and ASF for video. It can also manage JPG pictures, but  this feature  is implemented just for syncing with the Zune player, so it is very limited in functionality. Like iTunes, it can rip and burn audio CDs.

Zune devices can only be managed using the Zune Software and no other media players are compatible with Zune software.  As Zune Marketplace is tightly integrated with the Zune Software, it  has also gone largely unnoticed.

Library management

Zune Software allows folder monitoring so whenever you drop files in the monitored folders they are automatically added to your collection. You can define folders for music, videos, pictures and podcasts from local or external drives. Sweet!  iTunes can replicate the same behavior only on the Mac using Folder Actions. The default location of the Zune library (songs downloaded from the Marketplace, podcasts and ripped CDs) can easily be changed, even from the first start-up screen.

Smart playlists are known in Zune as Autoplaylists. Unlike iTunes, where you can burn any playlist as an audio CD or MP3 Data CD, Zune Software has a dedicated burn playlists and you can burn it only as an audio CD.

At the bottom you can select the default playlist and any tracks dragged onto the playlist icon are added to that playlist. Another nice feature that iTunes did not implement properly is the Now Playing playlist.

It can automatically download album cover art and metadata for the content in the library or you can do it manually. It  does a good job at finding cover art, significantly better than iTunes.

Other than marking a song as favorite (the only functionality I see in this is  for the social extension since there is no favorites autoplaylist) or editing the metadata, there’s not much you can do.  In iTunes you had some more sophisticated options like specifying whether a song should be skipped when shuffling or the start and end time if there’s just a part that you like.

You can rate songs but it doesn’t have a five star rating systems like iTunes,  just a love/ don’t love heart symbol.

Searching brings results both from your collection and also from the Zune Marketplace, nicely divided in to two panes. This would be a view that I’d like to see in iTunes.

Look and feel

The look and feel of a software used for managing, discovering and listening to music is very important for the user experience and could be considered a deciding factor in buying a music player. In my opinion, the Zune Software is a worthy contender for the “Best Jukebox experience” title.

Interface

Zune has a unique, beautiful, clean(!), user-friendly and intuitive interface, which makes it far more attractive than any other media player I’ve used before. Even with the Cover Flow and the new Grid View, when compared to Zune, iTunes still looks too much like a spreadsheet.

The nested-tab navigation is remarkably easy to use and seems so natural you wonder how you managed to live with out it.  In the upper left corner you will find the main tabs: Collection, Marketplace and Social as well as a tab for Zune devices when connected or CD when inserted.  Each main tab contains nested-tabs to display different  content. For instance, under the Collection tabs there are tabs for media stored on your computer: Music, Videos , Pictures, Podcasts and Channels.

The third level of nested-tabs allows you to choose the type of view you prefer. For Music you get Artists, Genres, Albums, Songs and Playlists. Each of this view has an uncluttered layout and they all look attractive, but I find the Artists view the most useful.

Themes

Zune Software does not support themes but  you can change the background. You get seven different backgrounds, the first being completely white, and the rest having some washed up colors on the same white background, but interesting non the less.

Now Playing

Zune doesn’t come with a true full-screen view or a mini-player but  it has a fabulous Now Playing screen, that tiles album art across the application window.

If your graphic card supports it and if you enabled the Premium graphics rendering with animation option, the Now Playing screen fills up with high quality photos of the current artist and animated bio info. I prefer this to any iTunes Visualizer.

Podcasts

Podcast support in Zune is decent.  No complains or new features here.

Music discovery features

Zune comes with three interesting music discovery services: Mixview, Channels and Picks.

Mixview

Mixview puts at the center the current artist (selected or playing), and flowing around it,  squares representing works of  the same artist, related artists, artists who have either  influenced or been influenced by the respective artist  and top listeners. When you click a square, the item moves in the center and new related items are displayed.  When you mouse over the center you can get more info, play or buy the item. Very cool!

Channels

If you are busy and don’t have time to track all the music you like, you can subscribe to  channels, that are basically  regularly-updated playlists that Zune Pass members can subscribe to. These are updated by partners–industry heavyweights and Zune employees. I’m going to talk about the Zune Pass a little later.

Picks

Like iTunes Genius, Picks makes music recommendations tailored to your taste, based on your listening habits. your friends and those listeners who prefer the same artists as you. After 116  plays I still didn’t get any recommendations. It is supposed to get better the more music you listen to.

Zune Marketplace and Zune Social

There are some differences between the Zune Marketplace and the iTunes store. The Zune Marketplace offers a lot less music (4 million songs) and no feature length movies or audio books. On the other hand, you have a simple interface and a subscription-based service called Zune Pass, which didn’t turn into a big hit.

For purchasing songs, Microsoft uses a system called Microsoft Points.These are available in denominations of $5 for 400 points. A song is 79 points, which equals to $0.9875, similar to the price on iTunes, but from a psychological point of view 79 is less than 99. To me, the only logical explanation for this confusing system is Microsoft’s greed. Just think at the fact that if you buy 400 points with 5$ you can buy only 5 songs with 395 points, so the remaining 5 points which equals to 0.0625$ remain to Microsoft.

Music content is offered in DRM-restricted WMA format @ 192kbit/s or non-DRM MP3 format (256kbit/s) for a per-song or per-album fee, or via a $14.99 Zune Pass monthly subscription.  The non-DRM offering is larger than Apple’s, but these MP3s are hard to find.

The Zune Pass allows you to download an unlimited number of  tracks, you can play on up to three computers and three Zunes. You are actually renting the music, since Zune Pass downloads cannot be burned to audio CDs and become unplayable when the subscription ends, unless purchased. Luckily you get to keep 10 DRM songs per month and all the MP3s. Also, with the Zune pass you can preview the whole song, not just 30 seconds. Still, 14.99$ seems a little expensive.

When you create a Zune account you get a 14-day free Zune Pass. The Zune pass isn’t a bad deal if you take into consideration that you can strip the DRM relatively easy(FairUse4WM).

Even if you don’t subscribe to the Zune pass you still have access to the music discovery services that will be applied on you existing collection and any music you rip of CDs.

Zune Social is the free online component that displays your  most-played artists, recently played and favorite songs, and a list of your friends. You can also earn badges, if  you listen to an album or artist a certain number of times. This info can be showcased on a user’s Zune card, which is a flash widget that can be embedded on other social sites like MySpace or Facebook.

Conclusion

Zune is a viable alternative to iTunes on the PC side, and you should really give it a try. For me, the Zune Software offered the best music experience on the Windows platform so far.  Too bad it doesn’t support other audio players. If you want to buy an iPod and use it with a Windows PC, I suggest you also try a Zune player first. I know I would, after seeing how elegant the Zune’s interface is.

Installation

When I clicked the download button, I was really expecting a 80 MB download followed by half and hour of installation and a Windows reboot cycle; I had sort of a kamikaze feeling, not knowing if my machine will boot again normally.

But instead I was amazed to be looking at  a 15.9MB self-extracting archive that installed in under 2 minutes and clicking Next only three times! This is a big improvement in my opinion, although it’s still twice as large as Firefox 3 at 7.1 MB.

Another noteworthy aspect is speed: both start-up and page load time have been, in my case, noticeably faster.

Features

If you’ve been keeping up with the development you’ll know most of the improvements listed here:

• Web Slices: parts of webpages that can be stored for quick access right in the toolbar; for example the upcoming stories for Digg.

• Suggested Sites: recommend you websites based on previously visited pages.
• Accelerator: apparently this manages to integrate different sources of information into one page – making searching things faster; I’m going to look further into this.

• InPrivate Browsing Mode: Similar to Safari’s ‘Private Browsing’ feature it prevents IE from storing history, cookies or other ‘tracks’.
• Google Gears and Windows Live Writer integration.
• Opera style overview of currently open tabs.

• Highlights the domain name in the address bar and prominently featured security certificates.

Conclusion

It’s not bad at all, and so far it hasn’t crashed or caused any problems. Worth the time for any Internet Explorer users. For the rest of us, who can’t get enough of the Firefox plugins – put your mouse down and continue browsing.

And a little fun fact, 3,26% of visitors to the Tux Geek use IE8, 8% Safari and 75% Firefox. Get IE8 here.

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?