blogs.chron.com — It's probably not an exaggeration to say that Windows 7 is Microsoft's most important release of its operating system in a decade. That's not necessarily because of its advances, or what it does for Windows users, but rather because of what it means for Microsoft as a company.
Jan 6, 2009 View in Crawl 4
hbyrneJan 6, 2009
It sucks just a little bit less.
bhank21Jan 7, 2009
i agree with you. it seems every company has a shill army for this kind of thing. oh wait, that would be the marketing dept.
edwinjoseJan 7, 2009
I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they ’re finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/microsoft/Windows_NEXT_VERSION_will_floor_all_comers">http://digg.com/microsoft/Windows_NEXT_VERSION_wil ...</a>and to think we will fall for this again. I say we all cry wolf.
burrgrinderJan 7, 2009
Or you could develop web services that reach 99.99% of the marketshare. Unless you need the GPU, local filesystem, or huge processing power (most "essential" or work-related software doesn't), you'd better served being OS-agnostic. Adobe AIR even bridges that gap of system dependence while retaining system access.The individual OS is mattering less and less.
pr0t0Jan 7, 2009
"As I've written, this has more to do with perception than reality..."Obviously I can't speak for all businesses, but for my company, how well the OS runs on any particular hardware has nothing to do with adoption rate. The "reality" is that we have a lot of industry-specific software, written by small niche developers (or small niche development teams in larger corporations), that are really still trying to perfect their products for the current OS. They don't have the muscle to make their products work with whatever the latest and greatest OS Microsoft is rolling out.Part of this has to do with the "go-with-what-you-know" development process (we have one key piece of software that deeply tied to IE6). It could be laziness (ie coding quick, not right). I don't know the forces at work in software development, it seems pretty broken from an outsider's perspective, particularly when some companies can keep pace and rely on best practices while others do not.We also have our own reasons for selecting this software and while price is a factor, it's usually not the only factor. That software tied to IE6 is the only one of its kind that does everything we need it to do. The point I'm circuitously getting to is that most companies are like mine. They are dependent on one or more applications that either won't run, or won't run well on Vista (32 or 64), and likely not on Windows 7 no matter how awesome it is.Perhaps if Microsoft spent some time focusing on creating a toolset that would be easy for developers to use, and focused on seamless transition from one OS to the next, they would achieve the adoption rates they are looking for. They might also want to consider a "certified" status for software that would force developers to break their bad habits. We would probably be more inclined to pin our software selections to companies whose software we knew would work with future OS releases. With the probable exception of open-source software, most software companies can not realistically make that claim right now.
dawnraid101Jan 8, 2009
Nope and why the f**k would I?Im quite happy with my Leopard / Windows 7 boot camped MacBook Pro, it all just works, It has great development tools and every application that I will ever need runs on it.
karel747Jan 8, 2009
Great show, people. (Just commented so that I can find this thread later)
tehjoeJan 9, 2009
No I can't play the latest games. They all suck.
smoothapeJan 10, 2009
Looks great, if they bundle in a few extra features they will have totally ripped off OSx, well done Microsoft.