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  • Windows 7 surges

    Windows 7 has attained the 10% usage share milestone, almost a year faster than Vista did, according to web analytics company NetApplictions.com, which monitors the OS market.

  • Vista's market share declines, Windows 7 surges

    Microsoft's Windows Vista lost market share last month for the first time in almost two years, a sign that users are already abandoning the controversial operating system in favour of the new Windows 7.

  • Waikato polytech moves early to Windows 7

    The Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) has begun deploying Windows 7 to its large campus PC population in advance of the general release of the new Microsoft operating system.

  • XP will be around a while yet, despite Windows 7

    According to a ScriptLogic study, 60 percent of all companies surveyed said they will not be moving to Windows 7 any time soon. Thirty-four percent said they'd probably deploy by the end of 2010, but even that number may be optimistic. This means that by 2011, for the first time ever, a 10-year-old operating system will still be the most-used desktop OS.
    Of course, Microsoft's licensing means that this unfortunate fact won't cut too deeply into the company's bottom line. While Microsoft's OS market may be stagnating, hardware is hardware, and it will fail and need replacing. That's when they'll manage to sell you yet another licence that can be downgraded to XP.
    As the recent support extension for XP shows, Microsoft does see that users aren't falling all over themselves to upgrade to Windows 7, just as they weren't for Vista. The fact that many seem to hail Windows 7 as a far better OS than Vista doesn't really make a difference – the real problem isn't that Vista or Windows 7 aren't ready for the enterprise, it's that for the vast majority of business cases, Microsoft XP with Microsoft Office 2000 is all that's necessary – possibly for quite some time.
    After all, why do you think that Office 2007 had a massive UI change? Because that was one of the only ways to differentiate it from Office 2003. The back-end stuff, like support for the OpenDocument Format, could have been added to Office 2003 as it was to Office 2007. Office 2007 was basically a "New and improved!" sticker on Office 2003.
    As far as business desktop computing goes, that's a novel idea. For the past 15 years companies have been upgrading constantly, moving from Windows NT 4 to Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003 or, on the desktop, from Windows 95 to 98 to 2000 to XP. And that's where they sit.
    As a consultant during those fiery days, it was upgrade or die, and I was on the front line – the inherent problems in NT and 2000, and with Windows 95, 98, and 2000, made yearly upgrades essentially a requirement. If I had a dollar for every Windows NT-to-2000 migration, or Windows 2000-to-2003 migration I ever did – actually, I have more than a dollar for each one. Never mind.
    The reality is that in any industry that grows as fast as business computing has, there will come a point of "good enough". That's where we are right now. The vast majority of ISV applications in use support XP and still don't officially support Vista. Nine-year-old XP is still the sweet spot.
    I recently spoke with an IT manager who was budgeting for an Office 2010 upgrade from Office 2003. I casually asked him what features he had deemed important enough to justify a US$100,000 budget item. He thought for a minute and admitted that he couldn't think of a single one. So I asked the logical follow-up: Why are you buying it? He had no answer for that either. The $100,000 line item disappeared. He is also sticking with XP.
    This isn't Microsoft's fault, necessarily, unless you believe that they caused this by finally coming up with a somewhat stable and secure desktop OS (that statement includes a huge grain of salt). The company certainly did delay far too long in releasing Vista, which was late, slow, buggy, expensive and essentially DOA, and then compounded the issue by hyping Windows 7 a year before its release. This provided some cover for the Vista debacle, but also ensured that several more years would pass before most companies would move beyond XP – a modern-day example of the Osborne Effect. The economic downturn just solidified this situation.
    The past 15 years have been a whirlwind of innovation, expansion, invention, and production. The next 15 will be the same – but not in the same places. The corporate desktop is mature in both hardware and software. Same for servers and network architecture – very few companies actually need 10G. The new frontiers are portable productivity, interconnectivity and virtualisation. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they're far behind in those categories. After all, it's hard to quickly move in new directions when your saddlebags are full.

  • Windows 7 free upgrade limit 'silly', says analyst

    Microsoft's limit on the number of computers eligible for free Windows 7 upgrades is "artificial" and "silly," an analyst said today, and may create just the situation the company hoped to avoid: stalled PC sales.

  • Aussie Defence scraps Vista, Office, Exchange upgrades

    The Australian Department of Defence has abandoned its deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and will forgo plans to deploy Windows Vista and Office 2007, citing the products lack "significant business advantage".

  • Windows 7 uptake could be stalled by economy

    The turbulent economy could hinder enterprise adoption of Windows 7, even though many companies opted to skip Windows Vista and are still running Windows XP OS, analysts say.

  • Windows 7 first impressions and Microsoft's XP quandary

    After downloading the Windows 7 beta last week and tossing it on a VM, I finally made the move and selected it as my default Windows installation. Normally, my Windows desktops are VMs that I RDP into from my Macs, via the VMware Workstation console on my big Linux workstation where they run. However, I have an IBM Intellistation zPro running Vista that's my 'big box' Windows install. It has been powered off for a few weeks now. Instead, I opted to take an HP 2710p tablet and turn it into my physical Windows 7 box, at least to start with.
    There was nothing special about the installation, except for the fact that it thankfully only takes a few clicks. Much to my surprise, however, when the 2710p booted post-installation, just about every piece of hardware was accurately detected and available. A few pieces missed the cut, such as the fingerprint reader, but Windows 7 helpfully pointed that out and even gave me a link to download the Windows 7 driver and software for it. That was very handy.
    The new taskbar is supposedly the killer feature of Windows 7, and it's certainly an improvement over every other taskbar implementation Microsoft has introduced. Unlike some others, however, I don't see this as besting Apple's Dock, but it's definitely a better alternative to anything found in Windows XP or Vista. However, the fact that clicking on an open application icon in the taskbar doesn't actually bring that application window into focus if it has multiple open windows drives me nuts. You have to click the icon, then select the window you want — too much mousing around.
    After reading Tim Sneath's "Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets," I opted to place the taskbar to the left of the screen, and I find it handier on smaller screens.
    The eye candy when hovering over active applications is nifty, and it makes window selection simpler to some degree, with the caveats noted above. Microsoft even introduced single-app window selections, a la Mac OS X's Cmd-~ switcher, but it's really annoying to access. To only switch between windows in the active application, you must hold down the Ctrl key and repeatedly click the icon in the taskbar. This is less than useful. There's an Alt key and a tilde key on this keyboard — use them.
    Fast application switching is a problem on Windows now and will continue to be in the future. The issue is the Alt-Tab method of switching between open windows, which is only useful if you have a small number of open windows. When you have dozens, it's fairly useless. When this switching method was first introduced, there simply wasn't enough horsepower to have dozens of windows open anyway and so it didn't matter. Times have changed, however. Apple's method of using Cmd-Tab to switch between applications, and Cmd-~ to switch between windows in that application is a much better design.
    All the Vista-compatible applications I've tried have successfully started and run under Windows 7 beta, including several that were problematic under Vista, such as the ShoreTel client. There are the normal UAC annoyances, but they can be disabled just like Vista if you like to live on the edge. As with all my Windows installations, I paid the performance penalty and installed a virus scanner and Windows Defender to keep an eye out for viruses and malware.
    This being a tablet, I was able to test those features too. It's much the same as with Vista, no problems there. Of course, with my newfound use of the left-hand taskbar, I had to move the Tablet Input Panel to the right-hand side of the screen. It might be a little faster than Vista, but I haven't noticed any significant increase in performance on this laptop and I'm not going to run benchmarks on beta code.
    So Windows 7 is very nice and all and perhaps it is the best iteration of Windows yet, but there really isn't that much there, other than the improved taskbar. When Apple released Leopard, there were significant feature additions and improvements, such as Spaces, Time Machine and so forth. That type of step forward seems to be missing from Windows 7. In addition, there's still no compelling reason for businesses to switch from Windows XP and that's Microsoft's biggest problem of all.
    For the majority of business users, Windows XP and Office 97 or 2000 are more than enough to handle day-to-day business tasks. In this economy, upgrading functional server and desktop operating systems isn't in the budget, especially when there's no business reason to do so. This isn't a secret, since the corporate response to Vista was lukewarm at best. Those who jumped on the Vista bandwagon initially, certainly aren't going to be thrilled to make another leap to Windows 7 so soon. I do know that I'm in absolutely no hurry to move away from Windows XP as the corporate desktop except in some extreme cases — it's just not worth it.
    This leaves Microsoft selling to home users and power users, while also relying on the OEM installations to push copies of Windows. The problem there is that by working on Windows 7 so soon after Vista's launch, Microsoft has effectively orphaned Vista — why buy a copy now when Windows 7 is right around the corner?
    In a nutshell, did Microsoft peak with Windows XP?

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