In April 2007, I was freelancing for HardOCP.com, writing an article called “30 days of Windows Vista.” And at the end, I concluded that “this product is unfit for any user.”
On the other hand, I’ve been using the beta of Windows 7 on my personal laptop, desktop, and media PC without problem for months now, and I’m very happy with the stability and performance of the operating system. The reviews are positive, and in the U.K., where there was a substantial price cut, pre-orders for Windows 7 have out-sold pre-orders for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
The more I think about it, I wonder if Microsoft doesn’t suffer from some sort of “Star Trek” curse, with every other operating system release decent, and the rest, doomed to mediocrity, with 95, 2000, XP, and 7 as “Wrath of Khan,” “The Voyage Home,” “The Undiscovered Country,” and “First Contact,” respectively. Okay, maybe 98 doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with ME and Vista, but neither does “Search for Spock” deserve to be lumped in with “The Final Frontier” and “Generations.”
But I digress.
Unlike Windows Vista, Windows 7, I believe, will be adopted more readily in office and enterprise environments, for the simple reason that there’s compelling reasons to upgrade. Which means that businesses that skipped out on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 may want to revisit some of the networking considerations that were brought up when Vista came out, like Compound TCP/IP, and 802.1x security features.
More importantly, the one thing that I think makes Windows 7 different from Windows Vista’s launch is that Windows 7 was launched by taking user concerns to heart – that is, they listened to the end-user when they developed the operating system, including optimizing Windows 7 for slower hardware on portable computers, and getting rid of the worst annoyances of the UAC “Cancel or Allow” dialog. And it just reminds you that if you want to do a good job for your customers, you have to listen to what they have to say and focus on what problems they need to fix most, and what features they would most like.
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