The campaign is on. The many minions of Microsoft are setting out on their appointed tasks, to speculate on what will and won’t be in the next revision of Windows, what needs to change, and be sure that the public is no better off than they were before the project started – but they will be whipped into a buying frenzy.

Yesterday, I had a comment I made get removed from the queue on a post by MaryJo Foley, over at ZDNet. The article was one of the above types, speculating about the changes that would take place in the next couple of years, before the Redmond crew unleashes Windows 7 upon the buying public. The article was not terribly informative, but since not much has been released, it could not be. That is part of the problem. By engaging in constant speculation, the frenzy is maintained. Thinking that that frenzy is a bad idea, I simply posted a small statement of my thoughts at the moment. The entire comment was ‘Let the FUD begin.’

Apparently this was too much truth for the lightweights at ZDNet – but they did get their point across – I will probably never comment on the posts of anyone ever again. I did go back to see if any others felt the same way, and saw that others had commented that their comments had also been removed.

I’m assuming that the free interchange of ideas is no longer welcome there, and there are more than me who have become persona non grata.

That is not the main thrust of this post, just an aside -  thanks for the indulgence.

An article this morning on ExtremeTech titled ‘How to Make Windows 7 Not Suck’ sounds at first like a diatribe from Wayne’s World - Land of Redmond, but is surprisingly well thought out. It gives the reasons in order, why Vista has failed, and what should change. Whether it will is anyone’s guess. Not to seem overly pessimistic, but a big part of the problem is that Mr. Ballmer has already said that ‘7′ will be a Vista with patches, sort of like Vista SP2, or SP3, depending on how long we have to wait.

Microsoft has never really been good at accepting criticism, of any kind, so that includes the constructive kind. It has never had to backtrack - each iteration has been more grandiose than the one before - and it had up to January 2007, served them well.

Now it is time to dial the main features back, as so many of them are bloat, and unnecessary for 90% of the users. It seems as though the biggest problem facing the designers of ‘7′ is sticking to the original design concept that Gates had for DLLs. Dynamic Link Libraries were supposed to flow freely in and out of memory, allowing the operating system to be small and compact, yet accomplish almost anything when needed. Of course, this same idea was supposed to work for application programs as well, and we can see how well that worked.

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