Windows year in review: part 1
2008 has been the year XP refused to die, Vista continued to cause controversy and Windows 7 made its first public appearance. Now we look back at the ups and downs of the world’s dominant operating system.
On New Year’s Day, Jonathan Schaffler made a point to prove a common theme for the year: the knowledge that Windows 7 was already in the works and would likely fix many of the problems of Vista was likely to prompt many would-be upgraders to hang on a couple of years.
The same week, Bill Gates announced more than a hundred million people were using Vista, though it soon became clear this was the number of licenses issues for the software and no guarantee every licensee was regularly using the system. Later that month, Microsoft announced consumers could no longer get XP after 30 June – a deadline which turned out to be undermined by loopholes.
Early leaked screenshots of Windows 7 had been dismissed by some as fake because they so closely resembled Vista. In February it became clear the shots were genuine and that Windows 7 would be more of a remake than a fresh start.
The year’s biggest Microsoft legal story took a significant step in February with the news that customers suing over the ‘Vista Capable’ marketing scheme had been granted class action status.
March 18 saw the release of Vista’s Service Pack 1: despite a mistaken early launch and compatibility problems with Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft still hoped it would (as is traditionally the case) mark the moment when corporate buyers felt confident enough to install the system, reasoning most initial bugs would be fixed. Those businesses who were already running Vista didn’t seem impressed, with just 8 percent describing themselves as “very satisfied”.
One of the bigger problems with Vista’s reception seemed to be the irritation caused by the User Account Controls system. In April, a Microsoft official explained this annoyance was intentional; the (misguided) hope was that users would turn their anger toward software producers who’d be forced to improve security.
Still, things were put into perspective when Blorge readers voted Vista only the second worst Microsoft operating system of all time, with Windows Millennium Edition the clear winner.
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December 29th, 2008
XP is dead. Long live XP!
Don’t forget to multi-boot into other OSes!