New Windows Release

Windows 7 is released on Thursday, but one statistic that caught my attention was

in a Wikipedia article, which says that there are estimated to be three times as many XP computers in use today than Vista ones. This would indicate that XP is not the dinosaur that the marketing people would have us believe. I've still running XP on two desktops with no complaints, even though they are getting on a bit.

It also leads to questions about how popular Vista was with the general public and business world, and in this a recent BBC article a Microsoft executive admits that Vista never fully recovered from the early criticism, and they hope for better things with Windows 7.

Two quotes in particular that stick out is that of Annette Jump, a research director at a technology research firm who states that among companies "Vista is the worst-adopted operating system", and another by the president of Microsoft International, Jean-Philippe Courtois, who opts for the understatement "We don't feel great about Vista adoption."

I'm still running the trial version of Windows 7 which is valid for 180 days, but won't be camped outside the shops when it is launched. Ian MacMillan, via e-mail"

At the time of writing we are at the eve of the official release of Windows 7 and as such we will soon be able to gauge the public reaction which is something Vista never seemed to recover from. Personally I feel that Vista go such bad press at the start because the release date kept being moved and they made unrealistic promises about what the software would offer. It wasn't that Vista was ever particularly bad, it just wasn't much better than XP and, unless it was being bundled with a new machine, there wasn't much of an incentive to upgrade.

Windows is a big deal for Microsoft; at present it powers around 90% of the worlds computers and accounts for half of the operating profit that reaches the Microsoft coffers. Critics have claimed that Microsoft's apparent monopoly of the personal computing world is about to end now there are alternatives being offered to uses, such as Linux, Mac OS and the brand new "cloud" operating systems.

Quite simply Microsoft cannot afford to have another 'Vista' as although they still retain a commanding lead in the marketplace, another slip up could permanently and irrevocably damage their presumed place as a future market leader.

So far however, all seems good with the new offering. I have been using the release candidate of Windows 7 for some months and have found it to be reliable, compatible, secure and even faster than Vista which we have to remember is a three year old Operating System now.

The company have also been working with other third party developers to ensure that application support on release is strong; by the time Microsoft rolled out the first service pack for Vista there were only 2,700 supported applications and by comparison Windows 7 will have 8,500 supported applications at launch. It would seem that Microsoft are going to avoid one of their biggest mistakes with Vista, by preparing its partners for the new system too.

From a business perspective, we will be stocking the new Operating System and so I hope that it does well but from a writers perspective I would be interested to see what were to happen if Microsoft were to drop the ball a second time around.

by: Chris Holgate

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