A lot of people are hoping that Windows 7 will be a revolutionary product, much like the Mac OS/X was. However, I don’t think so. Microsoft has a history of spit-and-polish when it comes to OSs. There was Windows 3.0 then Windows 3.1. Then there was Windows 95 followed by Windows 98, and Window NT 3 followed by NT 4. Then there was Windows 2000 followed by Windows XP. And now we have Vista, which I expect to be followed by Windows 7, with the revolutionary product to follow 3 or so years later.
A comparison might be drawn with Intel, who have a similar policy with their CPUs: an inital release followed by a die-shrink.
So, Windows 7 will be a polish of Vista. What can we expect to see? A significant reform of Aero and UAC - making them much faster, for a start. With the introduction of Windows Home Server, I see an opportunity for MS to rationalise the SKUs. Instead of the plethora of products we have to day, I hope we’ll return to just the one, Windows Workstation. Connect it to a Home Server and it becomes a home client; connect it to an Active Directory and it becomes a Business Client. There will be extra polish with DX 11 and physics, of course.
With Windows 7, matters are complicated further because Vista is a transition product for moving from 32 bit to 64 bit, and ISVs aren’t following suit. As yet, there’s no 64 bit Flash, no 64 bit Acrobat Reader. Indeed, 64 bit utilities are only just beginning to appear. I’d like to see Windows 7 being purely 64 bit - it would save Microsoft a lot of work to ditch the 32 bit versions - but with the amount of 32 bit software around, I just don’t see that happenning, and the 32 bit / 64 bit dichotomy will confuse many users.
I know we’ve got a couple of Voles around so hopefully this should provide them with some amusement.
Windows 7 is still going to be an incremental update. The next revolutionary product from MS is rumored to be Midori, which is based on the Singularity project. But who knows when any of that will come to fruition?
Based on past experience, I’d say the next Windows release will[ul][]Require more RAM[]Take up more storage space on a disk[]Run slower (if at all) on older equipment[][]Run slower on new equipment until many tweaks are done[]Be lacking support & drivers at first, rendering it useless for early adopters[]Fix old bugs by changing the interface[]Introduce new bugs by changing the interface[]Require new learning due to the new interface[]Have options that no one can figure out how to work or why they were inplemented[]Be advertised as more secure, but introduce new vulnerabilities[]Cause support for older, faster and more stabile OSes to be dropped in order to sell new ones[]Not be very stable until SP 2[]Not incorporate features that smart hackers have been using for 10 years thru add-on programs[]Make add-on features hackers have been depending on for 10 years no longer work[]Lack direct support to the end user except at a $100/hour, $200 /incident chargeHave a plethora of fancy-schmancy features like 3D, flying windows and exploding popups to impress those who don’t know how much overhead that takes just to look pretty[/ul]
I don’t know, Musicat. Microsoft has to have learned something from Vista. It’s hard to imagine that they haven’t noticed that the market still continues to demand their older product (XP) for performance and reliability reasons even after software has had a chance to catch up and support the new OS.
I personally am sitting on a copy of Vista Ultimate that I got for free… and I’m still not using it because I prefer XP. I know several other people in the same position - there’s absolutely no cost to upgrading, but we prefer the old version. Companies that sell XP licenses on new computers charge a premium over Vista! They also had to push back the due date on no longer selling XP because of market demand. Some companies refused to use Vista at all. That’s all pretty damning.
I would expect to see a lot less in terms of visual appeal and a lot more performance in Windows 7. Microsoft would have to be fools to do otherwise.
I can’t imagine that Windows 7 would yet be 64-bit only. Software selection is very limited and it’s very expensive to make the 64-bit switch. We recently updated to 64-bit support on only one of our products and it was essentially redone from the ground up. Granted we’re making file system driver software but still it’s easy to see from the market that 64-bit support is coming on slowly.
I think it will be much different from Vista. Which could be good, could be bad if they fark it up worse than Vista.
XP Service Pack 2 is livable enough that it’s going to be hard to convince people they need more flashiness that will require more CPU, RAM, and hard drive space to run it.
This. Windows 7 must have a compelling feature set, or no one will have any reason to buy it. If they actually put in the file system that Vista was supposed to have, that might be enough, but without it there’s nothing I can think of.
The issue isn’t whether Microsoft realizes that they blew it on Vista. This issue is whether they can fix the significant management issues that have caused their problems, and salvage enough of their existing codebase to make a new version with the current one’s problems.
I read that Windows 7 would be modular and load parts of itself (probably for $$$ in many cases) from the Internet as needed, thus ending the confusion between Vista Basic, Vista Premium, etc.
I don’t think this is the case. The average home user prefers flash over speed because the average home user keeps buying new machines every 3 years even though they rarely do anything other than browse the internet and check email. Efficiency and speed are minor factors in reality for the average home user, even if they would claim otherwise out of ignorance.
The average Best Buy customer walks in and is dazzled by the “ohhh, pretty!” of Apples and Vaios running Vista Ultimate. They still think that CPU speed is solely indicative of performance and confuse RAM and HD storage by thinking that a 500 GB drive is faster than a 250 GB one.
The issue presented itself when Microsoft tried to dovetail the Business and Home user segment into one. Business users want simplicity, compatibility and efficiency. Home users want style, features and a shallow learning curve. Generally speaking these two concepts are divergent and it’s at the core of why Vista was such a problem.
Certainly gamers and power users are a loud and vocal minority of users that expect all of the above from their machines. They understand that visual bells and whistles like Aero are a massive drag on performance, it’s important to them because they actually use that extra performance regularly. The average Home user however has 75% more computer than they really need and that bloated polish doesn’t hinder their user experience because they have tons of processor cycles and megabytes to spare.
I know it probably won’t happen but MS ought to go back to the old philosophy of compartmentalizing business machines and home machines. They should create an austere look and feel with a bare minimum of overhead for business users. Build it without Aero-like style features, without redundant and marginally effective built-in firewalls. Strip out all the video and games and other bloat. Then create a Home user version that adds all those features. If any of the rumors about MS’s new platform are true this type of modular design is probably in the future and should allow people to chose a high overhead or low overhead interface based on their needs.
As for Windows 7, I think it will essentially be Vista SE. They’ll tweak the Aero interface (which I quite like, personally) and limit the level to which the OS nags you about processes and selections. I think you’ll see more transparency. You’ll see more compartmentalized control panels and there’ll be complete convergence with the Windows Live Suite of programs like Live Mail, Live Calendar and Live Messenger. Most importantly Windows 7 with simply do away with the albatross that is the Vista name.
I see what you’re saying Omniscent, but if users were wowed by pretty things then Vista would have been a success.
I think what keeps users away from Vista is all the changes of perfectly functional things, the lack of compatability, perceived or otherwise, the need to upgrade their machines, and the lack of a compelling reason to upgrade to Vista in the first place. People quickly discovered that XP was better than Win98, with 98’s crashes, memory management issues, and need to be reinstalled every year or two.
I’m not arguing that Vista is a great OS, just that it’s flaws aren’t in it’s flashy-high overhead concept. The problem was that it was buggy and had too many compatibility issues. I don’t think the snafu was so much a design or conceptual problem, as I’ve said I actually like the look and feel of Vista/Aero, but instead a management/engineering/business development problem. If they’d have released Vista precisely as it is now, with SP1, the fixes to driver issues and natural progression of computing horsepower to better run it, it would have been received pretty positively. Most of the animosity is a result of it being loaded onto older, under powered machines and the bugs that it contained. The flashiness and fundamental design isn’t a major complaint except for people with machines that can’t handle the flash.
The lesson for Windows 7 isn’t to strip it down and make it non-flashy, the lesson is to be very clear to your customers about what type of machine can run it and discourage people with older machines from trying to install it. Oh, and fix all the bugs first.
That’s the problem. New OSes should be designed and marketed for new computers. The people complaining weren’t the ones buying new high-end machines. The fact that MS tried to tell everyone running XP anywhere to upgrade is what created their problems. I’m not sure the 98SE to XP analogy is really apt. Windows 2000 to XP is a better comparison and most people who ungraded from the very solid Win2k platform to the initial implementation of XP had the same stresses and complaints as XP to Vista migrators.
I don’t want Microsoft or anyone designing software to operate soundly on 2 year old hardware. If MS is developing Windows 7 to perform optimally on my current mid-range Vista box they are wasting their time and wouldn’t be advancing the technology at all. When Windows 7 comes out I’d be foolish to expect it to be a better fit than XP or Vista on this hardware. The marketers need to manage expectations properly while the engineers push forward.
I absolutely do want MS to design an OS to run on a two year old machine. They will greatly expand their market if they do it right. Windows is far too bloated. Software needs to be efficient, they can’t count on people perpetually upgrading their hardware to support whatever bells and whistles MS can cram in to their latest OS. I don’t think anyone was asking for Aero. Maybe make Windows easily skinnable and leave it up to third-party for those that want it, but Aero was just something that MS crammed down user’s throats. I know several non uber-geek people that reverted back to the Win2000 interface on Vista, it’s less obtrusive.
And I think a lot of people don’t want to upgrade to a new machine. After processors got up to 2.0GHz or so, I haven 't really seen a big difference since then. Dual core is definitely nice, but 100 GB of hard drive space and 1 GB of RAM have been plenty for a basic web-browsing computer for 4 or 5 years now.
But overall, the biggest thing is they need to get the bugs out. How MS could have released Vista after all that testing and it took 2 minutes to start copying a batch of files is beyond me. And it took them months to patch it.