Vista's Days Numbered as Windows 7 Beta Nears
A quick note before we start: Your editor didn't realize until it was too late
that there would be no RCPUs the week of Thanksgiving, otherwise known as last
week. We had planned to run a barrage of reader feedback that week, but instead
we went dark. So, as the holidays near and news inevitably slows over the next
couple of weeks, expect some reader feedback from pretty deep in the archives
to appear in this space. Your weeks-old e-mail might show up here yet. Don't
give up hope!
Now, back to business. Not that Microsoft is trying to push Vista into the
retirement home early or anything, but there could be a Windows
7 beta available as early as next month. In any case, folks who attend the
upcoming MSDN Developer Conferences will get
Windows 7 DVDs at some point, and that point might be as early as mid-January.
At least Redmond has stopped pretending that companies are going to suddenly
wake up to the beauty of Vista and adopt it en masse. Microsoft hardly talks
about Vista anymore -- the last hardcore marketing of it we heard came at the
Worldwide Partner Conference in July, and all talk of Vista seemed to stop dead
after that -- and Windows 7 has been the primary buzz generator in Redmond for
a few months now.
We'd all be wise, though, not to view Windows 7 as some sort of operating-system
messiah that's going to save us from Vista. It'll actually be a lot like Vista,
as we all now know, and even Microsoft is starting
the spin on differentiating Windows 7 from -- oh, dear -- a Vista service
pack. If Redmond's already telling people that Windows 7 isn't just a glorified
Vista service pack, well... We'll let you draw your own conclusions.
The real question will be whether people just didn't like Vista and therefore
rejected it or whether they really, really like XP and don't want to move. If
the former is true, Windows 7 will hopefully fix some of the issues that made
Vista so annoying and get the Microsoft OS roadmap back on, um, track (there's
a mixed metaphor in there somewhere -- sorry). However, if users stick with
XP just because they like it and don't want to move away from it, Microsoft
will face the much more daunting challenge of convincing customers that they
really will need to upgrade to a new OS at some point -- or Redmond could
just speed the end of XP support, we suppose, and force everybody's hand.
Either way, Windows 7 is as much of a watershed OS as a company with 90-plus
percent market share can release. And it's already stealing the headlines from
Vista -- which seems to be just what Microsoft wants.
What do you want from Windows 7? What will it take functionality-wise to pull
you away from XP? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 12/04/2008 at 1:22 PM