Looking Around The World

Last night, while nursing a swollen foot (a matter for another article entirely), and trying to knock back the pain with massive doses of ibuprofen, I decided to start looking around to see if I was the only one with a fully dissenting opinion about Windows 7.

Could I really be a closet curmudgeon? Have I become a victim of ‘if it works, don’t fix it’? (If it’s true, my son, eighteen, and his friend from school are curmudgeons-in-training, because they don’t like much of what is shown in Windows 7 beta 1.)

I did manage to find a few things, notably this, from Info World

Windows 7: Perception becomes reality
Why the Microsoft true believers remain blinded to the reality of Windows 7.

I guess it was to be expected. After my article “Windows 7 unmasked” went live this week, the hate mail and snide comments came flooding in:

“Mr. Kennedy, you’re an ass.”

“You’re so clueless.”

“Go get a life.”

[ Find out how Randall really feels about Windows 7 in his review of the pre-beta release for InfoWorld, ""Windows 7 unmasked" ]

All of this passion over Windows? The product of a multi-billion-dollar global software enterprise that couldn’t care a whit about the loyalty or disloyalty of any given dork with a pocket protector living in his mom’s basement? Who is it, exactly, that needs to “get a life” here?

One thing about this world, no matter how ridiculous the person, company stand, or cause, there is always someone to take up arms to fully back it – thus the call for the Microsoft fanboy, to reverse the effects of those who see things without blinders.

But I digress. The sad truth is that, for many true believers, Windows 7 is still very much a fantasy product. It’s the Windows that will fix all of the ills visited upon them by Vista. The faster, leaner, more polished Windows that Vista should have/could have/would have been if only x or y or z had happened differently.

To these folks, I have only one thing to say: Wake up and smell the numbers!

Benchmarks don’t lie (at least not independently authored ones). And as my contemporaries over at PC Pro UK have confirmed (using their own test scripts), Windows 7 indeed performs almost identically to Windows Vista — a conclusion that echoes my own while at the same time pointing to the fact that Microsoft’s latest and greatest is rapidly transforming from a mere point release into a kind of social phenomenon.

Truth be told, the geek minions want to believe in Windows 7. That’s why they’ll ignore the hard data and instead keep lapping up the Microsoft Kool-Aid. These are the same sorts of folks who believe that Avacor will really regrow their bald spot, or that U.S. President-elect (love that cool “Office of” podium seal) Obama will really cut their taxes and save their 401(k) plan. Never mind that the stock market took a dive into the toilet the day after the election, or that Avacor’s claim to fame is something called “boost” — aka fake spray-on hair in a can. There’s simply no denying a true believer.

OK, easy on the President-elect bashing, he hasn’t taken the oath yet. Also, as someone with a full head of hair, I don’t care one bit about cranium paint.

That’s why you and I keep hearing reports from supposedly reputable sources claiming that Windows 7 “feels so much faster” than Vista. They use terms like “crisper” and “more responsive.” However, when you look for hard numbers — does my massive compound document load faster or does my Visual Studio project compile quicker — you find nothing. In fact, only those publications brave enough to slap a test harness on Windows 7 M3 (i.e. us — InfoWorld — and perhaps those PC Pro UK folks) know the real story:

That the raved-about performance gains in Windows 7 are entirely illusory, the result of some clever tweaking of the Explorer shell to make the UI feel more responsive. Microsoft knows from experience that first impressions are critical. That’s why it’s stacked the deck with Windows 7 so that your initial reaction — “the UI seems so fast” — sets the tone for the rest of your experience.

That it failed to squeeze any real-world performance gains out of Windows 7 (hint: it can’t — it’s architectural) is irrelevant. If the OS feels faster, then it is faster. Perception becomes reality. Microsoft wins.

Here I agree wholly. Windows XP may not be faster than Vista SP1, but it certainly feels that way. In the same manner, Windows 7 feels faster than Vista, which is good, but that isn’t why I loathe it, or really the point. The point is that we are all easily led by what we want to believe, and few are able to shake our prejudices. That is why I don’t complain about the speed of 7, only the blatant disregard for the users who have learned to do things a certain way, and the fact that is would be trivial (to use the word that Microsoft is fond of) to include the older menu system, for those who want it.

One more point to consider: Hardware.

Remember back to when you first sampled those Vista beta bits? What kind of hardware were you running on? Chances are it had just a single core, perhaps with hyperthreading. You also likely had no more than 1GB of RAM, much of which was constrained by a slower memory bus than the one in your current box. I’d even go as far as to say that the PC you’re using today would run circles around the PC you were using back in the summer of 2006, when Vista was just emerging from the shadows.

Now, imagine how you might have reacted had your first taste of Vista taken place on a quad-core box with 4GB of RAM and a fast video card. You see, Moore’s Law is a funny thing: Crank up the CPU while swelling the OS and application bits and everything stays about the same (in terms of performance). Repeat this process, while keeping the bits relatively unchanged, and suddenly the world is a faster place.

It’s why Windows XP seems so darned quick on today’s hardware and why your initial experience with Windows 7 will likely be so much more positive than your initial experience with Windows Vista. Kudos to Microsoft for holding the line with Windows 7 — given its track record, keeping the new version’s hardware footprint so close to Vista’s qualifies as a minor miracle.

I didn’t make these mistakes with Windows 7, which is why I installed it on a machine that was running XP SP2. It is an Athlon 64 3000, with 2 GB memory, and Radeon integrated graphics. That again, is why I don’t criticize the speed of 7; in that respect, all is well.

But let’s give the credit where it’s due: It’s Mr. Moore, and not Mr. Sinofsky, that deserves the thanks for making the bloated Vista code base seem at least semi-tolerable.

From the other article by this author, above

Bottom line: So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft’s follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.

So much for the Ballmer proclamation that Windows 7 uses the same drivers as Vista. Why must we be lied to? Are we in need of protection from the truth?

IT organizations rejected Windows Vista en masse, and Windows 7 is Microsoft’s response. Simply put, it’s not enough. Slapping an upgraded UI onto an already discredited OS platform fools nobody and serves only to further alienate the very enterprise customers whom Microsoft claims to be wooing. What the company needs to do is listen to its corporate customers and implement the features that IT shops have been requesting: lower resource requirements, better backward compatibility, and a clear migration strategy from Windows XP. The window for lowering resource requirements in Windows 7 has undoubtedly closed. But it’s not too late to fix Vista’s spotty support for legacy Windows applications. Application virtualization technology is an ideal way to isolate troublesome applications. If Microsoft were to include its App-V bits in Windows 7 — as part of a legacy-compatibility subsystem that could take over when a problem application is detected — I’d take its claims of targeting the enterprise more seriously. As it stands, there’s little in Windows 7 that IT shops will find compelling. Most of the new features are targeted squarely at consumers, which is the same formula that got Microsoft into trouble with Vista.

The larger question is what all those Vista refuseniks will do when their hopes for Windows 7 are crushed. Some will undoubtedly give in. After all, you can prop up Windows XP only for so long. However, for many shops, this may be the perfect opportunity to seriously explore the alternatives outside Microsoft. Ubuntu Linux gets more polished each quarter, while Apple hardware and Mac OS X continue to impress technical and nontechnical users alike.

From what I see, it is clear that most are just so happy to have something that works incrementally better than Vista,and that quenches their junkie’s thirst for a Microsoft fix.

One thing’s for sure: Microsoft’s once unassailable dominance of the enterprise desktop is wobbling on a precipice. Windows Vista has permanently eroded the company’s reputation among IT decision makers, and from what we’ve seen of Windows 7 so far, Microsoft still does not “get IT.”

No agreement from me here. Too many people are sheep, and for the same reason that many are afraid to change from XP, even more are afraid to look, or leap in the uncharted, non-Microsoft waters. No, Vista was such a loser that many will infer (not correctly, from my viewpoint) that Windows 7 must be a winner. However, without patting myself on the back, I have already asserted that Microsoft no longer gets it (or IT, for that matter).

One thing about people like me, who have the ability to even-handedly pan the ‘next great thing’ from Redmond; we are the same writers who told you about the other porcine meat, Vista.

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I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s a knob called ‘brightness’, but it doesn’t work.Gallagher