First Look: Windows 7

At PDC today, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until now, the company has been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months, Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. There have also been occasional screenshots of some of the new applets like Calculator and Paint. Now that the covers are finally off, the scale of the new OS becomes clear. The user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago. Read the full article and see the screenshots at ArsTechnica.Com

Revealed: What’s in Windows 7

Microsoft is bullish about Windows 7’s prospects, claiming the company “has never been in such great shape prior to a release of Windows”.

However, it admits that Vista caused both customers and OEMS too much pain, but promised that they would now reap the benefits in Windows 7. “The ecosystem wasn’t ready for the release of Windows Vista,” said Windows senior vice president, Steve Sinofksy.

“The driver compatibility wasn’t there, the application compatibility wasn’t there. UAC [user account control] was so famous, I thought it might surpass Clippy,” he joked. Read the full article on PCPro.Co.Uk

Microsoft renames it’s Vista Blog to the Windows Blog

“…we just re-launched our blog today as The Windows Blog sporting an all-new look and feel reflecting Windows in a broader sense instead of a single Windows release. We figured it was time to give our blog a good facelift (it’s looked the same since we originally launched in October of 2006) – especially as we start talking about Windows 7, Windows Live, and many other interesting Windows topics. Our old design focused strictly on Windows Vista. Our new design is no longer tied to a specific Windows release allowing us to talk about a wider range of topics.” Visit the new site here.

Comic: Motivation

Windows Vista No Longer Matters

Make no mistake: Microsoft has moved beyond Windows Vista, which will become all too apparent during this week’s Professional Developer Conference. Windows 7 is the future, and in many ways it’s the present, too.

Contrary to ridiculous assertions recently made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Windows Vista is a flop. If businesses aren’t buying Vista, after waiting six (now seven) years, it’s no success. Yet, during the last day of the Gartner 2008 expo 10 days ago, Steve asserted that Vista “has been extremely successful.”

A few days earlier, Steve boasted: “Vista is our best-selling product ever. So, if that takes too much getting over-we’re not going to have products that are much more successful than Vista has been. We sold over 180 million copies in the first 18 months, quite successful.” Really?

But who’s buying this “best-selling” product ever? “We have 180 million users, mostly on the consumer market,” Steve said in an Oct. 2 speech. Oh? According to Gartner analysts Neil MacDonald and David Smith, only about 10 percent of enterprises have adopted Windows Vista. That’s not a high number, particularly in context of the approximately six years between Windows XP and Vista. Read the full article on Microsoft Watch

Poll: What Operating System are you using at home?

“Hey, Dad…Can I have Linux back?”

“My oldest son, creator of flame wars, finally discovered that you can only surf to the nether regions of the Internet so many times before even Vista business succumbs to malware. His computer an unusable mass of pop-ups, spewing traffic over our network actually asked me tonight to reinstall Linux for him.

He still wants a Vista virtual machine since Spore is a pretty fine game and his Zune probably won’t play nice with Linux. However, for everyday use, he’s done with Vista. Not only does it lack the “amusing desktop effects” (which his mother hates, by the way, on her new Linux desktop), but even running Clamwin and Windows Defender, he still managed to infect it with a variety of junk, rendering it useless when he had a term paper to write.” Read the full article on Christopher Dawson’s Blog

Vista’s Succesor gets a Name

“…now is a good time to announce that we’ve decided to officially call the next version of Windows, “Windows 7.”

While I know there have been a few cases at Microsoft when the codename of a product was used for the final release, I am pretty sure that this is a first for Windows. You might wonder about the decision.

The decision to use the name Windows 7 is about simplicity. Over the years, we have taken different approaches to naming Windows. We’ve used version numbers like Windows 3.11, or dates like Windows 98, or “aspirational” monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista. And since we do not ship new versions of Windows every year, using a date did not make sense. Likewise, coming up with an all-new “aspirational” name does not do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.

Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore “Windows 7″ just makes sense.” Read the full post on the Windows Vista Blog

Has Microsoft lost it?

The ‘Wow’ marketing campaign for Vista has been replaced with the more desperate ‘if you try it, you might not hate it’ Mojave campaign, and mini-PCs – one of the few PC sectors that hasn’t stagnated – are sticking with Windows XP. Even Office, Microsoft’s cash cow, is under attack from free and open source rivals.

So has Ballmer inherited a poisoned chalice? Has Microsoft lost it? And if it has, can it find it again? Read the full story on TechRadar.Com

Maine To Skip Vista, Go Directly To Windows 7

In a troubling sign for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s key Windows franchise, businesses and government agencies continue to snub the latest version of the operating system, Vista, despite the fact that it’s been on the market for almost two years and has been significantly upgraded via a full service pack meant to solve a range of performance issues.

The ongoing shunning of Vista is even more surprising given that its predecessor — Windows XP — is, for the most part, no longer even on the market.

The latest organization likely to forgo Vista? The state of Maine. Read the full story on InformationWeek.Com

The top five reasons why Windows Vista failed

The public reputation of Windows Vista is in shambles, as Microsoft itself tacitly acknowledged in its Mojave ad campaign.

IT departments are largely ignoring Vista. In June (18 months after Vista’s launch), Forrester Research reported that just 8.8% of enterprise PCs worldwide were running Vista. Meanwhile, Microsoft appears to have put Windows 7 on an accelerated schedule that could see it released in 2010. That will provide IT departments with all the justification they need to simply skip Vista and wait to eventually standardize on Windows 7 as the next OS for business.

So how did Vista get left holding the bag? Let’s look at the five most important reasons why Vista failed. Read the full story on Between The Lines

Microsoft extends XP downgrade rights date by six months

Microsoft is sending some very confusing signals about Windows Vista – the latest of which it issued via a statement on October 3.

The Register reported on October 2 that Microsoft was going to extend again the date until which PC makers would be allowed to continue to offer Windows users “downgrade rights,” enabling them to switch from Vista to XP on new machines. The Reg said Microsoft had moved the downgrade cut-off date from January 31, 2009 to July 31, 2009.

I asked Microsoft about the Reg’s report and got this statement… Read the full article at All About Microsoft

A third of new PCs being downgraded to XP, says metrics researcher

More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to the older Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, a performance and metrics researcher said today.

According to Devil Mountain Software Inc., which operates a community-based testing network, nearly 35% of the 3,000-plus PCs it examined had been downgraded from Vista to XP.

“Either these machines were downgraded by [sellers like] Dell or HP, or they were downgraded by the user after they got the machine,” said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain. “In any case, these machines are no longer running Vista.” Read the full story on ComputerWorld.Com