Will Windows 7 wash away the bitter Vista feeling?
Windows Vista has been nothing shot of a disaster on all fronts for Microsoft. The question now is whether Windows 7 can undo the harm created by the failed operating system, wash away the nasty aftertaste, and restore some pride in the Windows name.
The story of Windows Vista isn’t a pretty one. Charged with replacing the most used and most loved Microsoft OS ever, Windows XP, Vista failed miserably. A poor launch with a poor reception from both the media and everyday Windows users meant Vista’s fate was set, and even though Microsoft quickly set about righting the wrongs and improving the OS with updates and bug fixes, nothing could counter that shaky start.
Faced with this, Microsoft surprisingly didn’t go back to square one and build a new OS from scratch. Instead, it set about aiming to replace Vista as soon as possible, and built Windows 7 around Vista. Just with some major improvements and most of the things people complained about in Vista stripped out or down.
Microsoft is going all out to persuade consumers that Windows 7 is the best operating system it, or anyone else for that matter, has ever produced. It wants Windows 7 to not only become the OS of choice for people currently using Vista, but also those still sticking with Windows XP. Which is a considerably large number.
The pricing of Windows 7 is competitive, certainly enough to ensure many people will be persuaded to upgrade come October. But Microsoft could, and maybe should, have gone even further and offered it for free. OK, so this was never going to happen but it was nice to dream for a little while.
I firmly predict that Windows 7 will be a bestseller. Windows XP users are likely to finally realize the world has moved on, and be persuaded by the good media coverage and critical reception being enjoyed by Windows 7 prior to launch that there is now a Microsoft OS worthy of being XP’s successor. And Vista users, most of whom have probably grown to love, or at least like, the OS in the past two years, will undoubtedly be keen to upgrade to its successor.
Only time will tell whether Windows 7 can truly wash away all memory of Vista, but it’s certainly got a good chance of doing so.
Related Posts:
June 29th, 2009
Microsoft isn’t going to “square one” because billions of dollars and all matter of Server products and legacy apps keep them from doing so.
They don’t have the luxury of a microscopic footprint like Apple did when they put out OSX.
I don’t understand the inability to realize that, for Microsoft, the client OS only exists to run their other products.
Vista has around 20% of the market:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41581/113/
While it’s hard to brand Vista as a success, I’m not so certain disaster is accurate either. It didn’t have much of an effect on revenue, it didn’t seem to drive a wholesale migration away from their brand. The Server product revenue grew double digits.
It’s biggest competition was XP, almost every computer sold still had a company OEM license. For a product that made every list of worst tech product it had very little impact for them considering what could have happened.
June 29th, 2009
I never understood why Vista has been getting such a bad rep. Other than its ludicrously high pc spec and space demands I actually find it superior to XP in every way.
June 29th, 2009
“. . . and even though Microsoft quickly set about righting the wrongs and improving the OS with updates and bug fixes, nothing could counter that shaky start.” This misses the point. Vista was going to be a failure well before it was released. MS promised high and delivered low. Feature after feature was removed and the final product was considerably less than MS originally hyped it to be. Add to that the debacle of Vista Ultimate? Where are all of the promised specials and extras? I use Vista and it is quite alright with decent hardware, but it is nothing like it should have been.
June 29th, 2009
I agree with Rimmer. I find most of the complaints about Vista are related to how the OS is administered, not how it is used. For the average user there’s plenty of improvements. The integrated search, for instance, makes life much easier.
For the administrator, well, like every new OS iteration they have to learn the new organization. I guess most admins just became lazy since XP had been out so long. And with the search, I don’t even care how things are organized; just hit the Windows key & type what you’re looking for (’printers’, ‘network’, etc.) and you’ll see the relevant stuff right away.
As to space demands, that’s a bit of a yawn seeing how large HDs and even SSDs are (and were when Vista was released).
CPU and memory demands are the only realy gripes I have with the product, but IMO anything dual-core or better with 2GB of RAM will perform fine, and there’s some mighty cheap hardware (both then & now) that fits that bill.
For new machines, I always go with the current OS, but for existing machines I tend to skip OS generations. My main PC I went from Win2K to Vista Ultimate in May 2007 (with a healthy hardware upgrade at the same time). So right now I’ve no plans on taking that machine to Win7 but will explore it on othe rmachines via the beta and possibly via a netbook later this year.
BTW, the author might want to proof read that first sentence and s/shot/short.
June 29th, 2009
Vista is not a brilliant operating system under the hood. It is bulky and it is bloated. The publicity about it makes out is worse than it is, and when it works, it is a brilliant operating system. Then again, almost any operating system is good when it works properly. Its when it doesn’t work that it is absolutely awful, unnecessarily difficult to fix at times and this is largely due to the UAC troubles. For the everyday user, few problems are present though.
Microsoft branding Windows 7 as the best operating system ever produced is a bit rich though. Sure, its a great improvement over Vista judging by the beta, and I’d say its a brilliant and stable operating system. Yet I’d also say OSX Leopard is better, and OSX Snow Leopard could prove to be better again. Windows Vista/7 take many hints from OSX aesthetically but fail to deliver under the hood as they are based on old code.
So it is definitely not the best ever, and I speak having used Leopard and Windows 7. But it is a definite improvement on Vista and with the ability to install it on any PC and not just on expensive Apple hardware will mean it sells very well.
June 30th, 2009
How short people’s memory is. I switched to Vista preinstalled on a brand-new HP laptop just before SP1 came out, naively thinking that most of Vista launch problems mus surely have been corrected by patches by then.
My computer had three blue screens of death within the first 30 minutes of my trying to boot it–before I had even tinkered with any of the default settings and software.
The video driver was basically not compatible with Vista, yet the machine was sold with Vista anyway. As much HP’s fault as Microsoft’s, I suppose, but inexcusable all the same. It wasn’t until SP2 that I my Vista installation has started to perform reliably, without driver hiccups and what-not.
The second-worst problem before SP2 was that my installation of Vista couldn’t ever wake up from sleep, and it often crashed on resume from hibernation. I got in the habit of leaving it on all the time just to avoid rebooting.
Even now with SP2, Vista loses contact with a NAS drive and networked printer routlinely that Macs and Windows XP machines on the same network never lose contact with.
Vista does improve on some things in XP: it’s zippier for me (with SP2) and the indexing is a huge help. But it’s also much worse in other ways: the UI to get into control panels and adjust network settings and everything is labyrinthine and counter-intuitive; file copying is unreliable; and the UAC realistically offers little protection and a lot of annoyance.
As software, Vista with SP2 is quite usable as an OS. But to call it a success means overlooking the negative publicity Vista had–on the basis of that publicity Vista has been a huge failure as a business initiatie. Plus, it also means conveniently forgetting the literal hell that Vista users suffered through early on with driver and other issues.
I think it’s fair to say that Vista is a complete failure as a business initiative, and it cost the company a lot of credibility and reputation, and it’s a partial failure as software for taking so long to become widely stable and reliable.
The expectations for Windows 7 are quite low but firm: the software has to perform reliably and well, out of the box, for the vast majority of users, without hiccups and driver issues. If those things are true, it will have been a success.
I preordered my upgrade to Windows 7 the first minute I could. I’m eager to get Vista behind me.
June 30th, 2009
I purchased Vista Ultimate (at great cost) in Australia, and found networking a harrowing affar. It still is. My NAS box often has an X through it, trying to connect to other (Vista) PCs is a nightmare, and network file copying is Glacial.
Also, I am constantly dismayed by the “not responding” messages displayed while a program is, in fact, responding (slowly).
I then tried the Win7 pre-release on my laptop, and found that nothing had changed, and so I swapped back to Vista. It isn’t any WORSE, and at least I OWN it!
But now I find that 7 Ultimate is going to cost me $450+, with no confidence that things are going to improve, and have decided that unless I can get a heavily discounted price on 7, This might be a really GOOD year to switch to Linux, or buy a Mac…
Mike