Windows 7 is coming. It’s been almost eight years since Windows XP was released, and we’ve spent more than 2 1/2 years with Vista already. New details are appearing daily about Windows 7 – its development status, availability, pricing, versions, promotions, and much more. It’s the beginning of a huge wave of coverage in the months ahead.
Microsoft wants and needs this buzz about Windows 7 to create excitement and try to put the Vista debacle behind it. Vista will be remembered as a failure; you’ll see that repeated so many times it will come to be the accepted wisdom. It’s not fair, it’s not true, but that will be the perception.
I have long believed that Vista got a poor reception in part because Microsoft misjudged the path for computer hardware. When development of Vista started in 2001, there was every reason to expect processor power to continue skyrocketing forever, for hard drives to get bigger and faster and cheaper, and for computer video to continue developing in power and sophistication faster than anyone could write programs to take advantage of it. All of that had been going on for years and it looked like it would keep going indefinitely.
At some point in the next few years, computer hardware stopped being interesting. Did you notice? Intel has introduced new processors, each slightly more powerful than the previous generation, but all of them are built on more or less the same processor design that has powered PCs for ten years or more and the differences from year to year are modest. Hard drives are certainly bigger and cheaper, but they’re not all that much faster than they were at the beginning of the decade.
And video development just seemed to stall. Sure, Nvidia and ATI still develop new generations of ever more powerful video cards for gamers but Vista was built on the assumption that every consumer and business computer would have a smoking video system that could easily handle Vista’s Aero visual effects.
It didn’t happen that way. Cheap underpowered video began to be folded into motherboards and consumers flocked to the cheapest systems at Best Buy, until finally Microsoft made the fatal mistake of agreeing to allow Vista to be installed on computers that could not handle it, as I wrote up last year. Add the problems with poor marketing, lack of support from manufacturers and developers, unrelenting attacks from Apple fans and skeptical (bored) journalists and bloggers, and Vista was doomed.
Windows 7 is a dressed up version of Vista but it’s likely to be greeted as a success. What has changed?
- Your Windows XP computers are three years older than when Vista was introduced. You’re much more likely to consider replacing them.
- Windows 7 has been tweaked to run far better than Vista on underpowered video systems and less powerful processors.
- Compatibility issues are over. Everything works.
- Microsoft has made enough changes that it can plausibly present Windows 7 as something new, and the journalists and bloggers seem willing (so far) to go along.
There is, however, one thing that should not be misunderstood, with some important consequences. Windows 7 has virtually identical hardware requirements to Vista. If you install Windows 7 on your 5-year-old computer, you’re not going to have a very good time. I’ll write more about upgrades next week!
