How time flies
by schwim on May.01, 2009, under Software
The release date of Windows 7 was leaked; Oct 23, 2009 is the date they begin telling you that it’s the best selling operating system they’ve ever designed, regardless of whether it actually is or not. If pressed, they’ll be able to give you numbers to show this. That’s because they’ll threaten to ruin any hardware vendor that dares to ship a box with anything but 7 on it. Regardless of whether that serial number is used or not, it is a sale and thus counts towards their impressive sales numbers.
XP was released on Oct 25, 2001 and Vista was released on Jan 30, 2007. If 7′s released doesn’t get pushed back, that gives Vista’s life a duration of a little under two years. Development began on Vista in May of 2001, which gives us a span of almost 5 years. They’ve touted Vista as the best selling, most secure and most successful operating sytem in Microsoft’s history. Until they began pushing the adoption of 7. Then they called Vista a necessary mistake; something they had to do to give the users what will be the best selling, most secure and most popular operating system they’ve ever developed.
Vista was XP’s ME. Something they released as an interim release due to pressures from other OS manufacturer’s. Just like ME, it was a stillborn and something that will go down in the annals of history as a screwup of epic proportions.
Which leads me to the following query; If Vista mimics the life of ME, will 7 follow the path of XP? Say what you want, XP is usable. Out of 7 computers in my house, 5 run XP. I’ve bought extra copies of the OS for any future computers that end up here. Vista, which came on my gaming computer and on my wife’s work rig is slow and awkward. I can’t imagine purposefully installing Vista.
Initially, it would seem that 7 will be what Vista should have been. After all, 7 was being developed alongside of Vista(remember that Vista was an interim release). When you take into account however that Steve Ballmer stated that 7 is a “revised” Vista, it tends to dampen your hopes that the most used operating system in the world is going to have a suck factor equal to Vista.
All of this suspense almost makes me install one of the thousands of linux flavors to begin hand editing samba config files throu vi in hopes that I can get to my networked files.
Nah, I’m just kidding, but I am concerned.
May 1st, 2009 on 8:54 pm
I’m not sure 7 is gonna matter much except, as you say, as another example of MMM (Microsoft Muscle Marketing) in which the merits of the technical product are of liitle consequence. I wouldn’t be surprized to hear that it fixes all the Vista problems and is “damn near as good as XP!”…. and the zombies will flock.
I think Apple will surpass Big M somehere along the way just because they’re so well intrenched in the mobile market. They’ve got their own zombies (actually a “Jobs sect”, something out of “Stranger In A Strange Land”. Jobs: “The aliens will be here soon so you won’t need earthly possessions. We’ll handle those for you. Don’t worry, we know how desperately you need to BE CONNECTED. It’s all good: we got it. Just put in your earbuds and crank it up. We’ll be serving the Kool-Aid real soon.”)
So M has missed the mobile thing and the search thing. They’re persona-non-grata on every continent except this one. Anyway, my guess is that as yet undeveloped cultures are gonna largely bypass the whole desktop thing altogether…. just go straight to mobile. Cloud? Maybe, but I don’t think they’re well positioned for that. Unfortunately, as Msoft goes into decline I expect that they’ll start hammering anyone who’s gotten anywhere near a patent violation.
So it may get tough for FOSS with Msoft on one side and MPAA/RIAA on the other demonizing it as the enabler of Dark Side computing.