Windows 7 Still Not Weaning Users Away The Alternatives

Microsoft has a problem. Despite the fact that Windows 7 is by far, the best chance they have to undue the mess they made with Vista’s lack luster excitement with performance and abilities, many people will either switch to OS X or just stick with XP. While I do not pretend to speak for everyone here, I can attest to the following.

- My brothers’ s family, all Windows XP users, have seen no reason nor motivation to switch to anything. Casual computing and gaming are their daily activities on about three PCs.

- Myself and my wife, I being a Linux user and my wife, a die-hard Mac user, are quite happy where we are at. While I myself have tested out the latest Windows  7 test releases, I can see no advantage for either of us changing things over. There is just no advantage to do so for us.

- My friend, Kira, a Mac user. She loves her OS X powered MacBook, is comfortable with the installed release of OS X Tiger, looking to move over to Snow Leopard eventually as it is released.

- My own mother, a perfectly happy Windows XP user. She enjoys Publisher, Word and other Microsoft programs. However at this stage in her life, she is not really needing to “change” to other platforms or even bother upgrading, really. When she is ready to upgrade her physical PC, it will likely be to whatever version of Windows is out there. But let it be known, she like so many others, has ZERO tolerance for her older Publisher and Office suite software not working on future releases of Windows. And something tells me that backwards compatibility with Windows 7 may be an issue with some software, which will lead to people saying “forget it”.

Now to be clear, there will be many others who may be thrilled to death to switch to Windows 7. Likely the bulk of them frustrated PC users wanting something “better”. Despite this, something tells me that on the desktop, OS X has not yet begun to suck away sales away from future Windows releases. While the percentages remain on Microsoft’s side, the same was once said about Firefox and IE. Yet today, the numbers have moved in a very different direction in favor of the underdog.