vistawatch
Ballmer’s Problems Three
March 18, 2010 | 
Author Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft is playing serious catchup in 3 big software development tasks:
1)Windows 7 still has speed, reliability, memory usage, hardware+software compatibility issues, and ease of use/learning-to-use problems versus Windows XP – hence Windows XP stays entrenched in corporates where Microsoft cannot muscle users off Win XP like it can in the consumer market place[for example, consumer PC buyers cannot find XP loaded on any machines except Netbooks where Vista and Windows 7 don't fit]. The result is the following market share:
Operating System Market Share
Meanwhile Apple MacOS and various flavors of Linux have superior basic performance, reliability and memory usage capabilities and ever improving feature sets. And with corporates wanting to break the 80-20 rule where 80% of their IT costs are spent paying for the status quo which is largely Microsoft based on the desktop – they are starting to look seriously at Macs, SaaS, Cloud Computing and even Thin Client machines. So Steve needs to get those 50% Windows XP users over to Windows 7 as cleanly and completely as possible. Now Apple and Linux both missed the 1 1/2 year opportunity that was Vista. For example, Apple sold their MacOS machines for 2-4 times as much as often more lavishly equipped Windows PCs. But I suspect that this summers round of MacBook and other offerings will be much more competitively priced like the iPad. And as for Linux, Google will be putting out both Android and ChromeOS Netbooks with boffo features and prices. So SP1 for Windows 7 and the HP Slate better be very good, because Microsoft has its most vigorous desktop competition in two decades.
2)Windows Mobile OS has now become Windows Phone 7. Previous Windows Mobile users including the recent Windows 6 and 6.5 users got bad news – very little of their tools and data will be able to move up to Windows Phone 7 except for what is provided by third parties. There is a reason for this draconian move:
eWeek – REVIEW: Windows Mobile 6.5 Improvements Leave Much to Be Desired
enGadget – Windows Phone 7 Series faces off against its Windows Mobile past
Gizmodo – Windows Mobile 6.5 Review: There’s No Excuse For This
Reviews like this have resulted in a dwindling Windows Mobile market share:
| Top Smartphone Platforms 3 Month Avg. Ending Jan. 2010 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Oct. 2009 Total U.S. Age 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens |
|||
| Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers | |||
| Oct-09 | Jan-10 | Point Change | |
| Total Smartphone Subscribers | 100.0% | 100.0% | N/A |
| RIM | 41.3% | 43.0% | 1.7 |
| Apple | 24.8% | 25.1% | 0.3 |
| Microsoft | 19.7% | 15.7% | -4.0 |
| 2.8% | 7.1% | 4.3 | |
| Palm | 7.8% | 5.7% | -2.1 |
Mobile Content Usage from comScore
So Microsoft had to do something drastic and it did. It brought the Zune and Xbox franchises into the Mobile Phone 7 feature-scape and added capabilities nearly equal to and sometimes greater than the smartphones it is chasing – iPhone, Android, and Palm. For its business customers, they can stick for the time being with Mobile 6.x and … well like Baidu when Google leaves China, RIM has a big opportunity . This is because Redmond, like the other mobile makers, is catering to what drives device-computing in terms of numbers and innovation – consumers. Microsoft has stopped trying to please both in Windows Mobile and has put most of its eggs into the Mobile Phone 7 consumer basket.
Redmond still has to stand and deliver with a major revision to its Mobile platform – so making holiday 2010 sales with distinction is going to be a major challenge. The opposition is moving ahead with some fighting features and solid performance; so again Microsoft is facing a huge market battle where it can not afford to be languishing behind Palm which itself is just hobbling along. Yet Palm is so good, that is a tall order.
3)Internet Explorer Browser reflects Microsoft’s ambiguity about the Web – Redmond appears constantly trying to workaround the Web such that Windows is central and the Web subordinate. For example, back in 1995 “MSN- Microsoft Network, launched along with Windows 95 on August 24, 1995. MSN was included with Windows 95 installations and promoted through Windows and other Microsoft software released at the time. …Open access to the World Wide Web was not originally included in the classic MSN service at the time of its initial launch, but Internet access was quickly offered through Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, which was available as a download from the MSN service or as part of the Windows 95 Plus! package”[see here for complete reference].
This was followed by Redmond’s “Cutting off the oxygen” to Netscape and Java by respectively giving away IE browserplus IIS for free and not updating the JVM on Windows thus obsoleting Java on most PCs. The net result was the Antitrust case against Microsoft and later Civil Suit settlements costing %4billion. But by 2000, IE had a dominate 85++% market share among Web browsers and Java after many promising offerings desktop from Borland, IBM, Sun and others was languishing as a desktop Web solution while achieving better success on the server side. In August 2001, Redmond stopped upgrading the IE browser except for security fixes. This hiatus lasted until October 2006 when Windows 7 was introduced. The idea behind this hiatus in Web development was to promote the Windows Smart Client with some embedded IE capabilities as the preferred way to connect to the Internet.
Source: Wikipedia
But problems continued for IE as rival browsers delivered much better compliance with W3C standards such as HTML, DOM, CSS, and JavaScript [for example, IE8 is still only about 50% compliant with CSS standards many of which stretch back to 1997-98 release while IE8's javaScript engine is only about 1/4 of the speed of its browser rivals]. But perhaps most damning, all the other browser vendors started to promote AJAX, a Microsoft innovation while Microsft downplayed and and stuck to a proprietary syntax and implementation which Web 2.0 developers have had to hack around for the past 6 years. The Net result has been that the IE broser has continued to lose market share as seen in the graph above.
| 2010 | IE8 | IE7 | IE6 | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| February | 14.7% | 11.0% | 9.6% | 46.5% | 11.6% | 3.8% | 2.1% |
| January | 14.3% | 11.7% | 10.2% | 46.3% | 10.8% | 3.7% | 2.2% |
| 2009 | IE8 | IE7 | IE6 | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera |
| December | 13.5% | 12.8% | 10.9% | 46.4% | 9.8% | 3.6% | 2.3% |
| November | 13.3% | 13.3% | 11.1% | 47.0% | 8.5% | 3.8% | 2.3% |
| October | 12.8% | 14.1% | 10.6% | 47.5% | 8.0% | 3.8% | 2.3% |
| September | 12.2% | 15.3% | 12.1% | 46.6% | 7.1% | 3.6% | 2.2% |
| August | 10.6% | 15.1% | 13.6% | 47.4% | 7.0% | 3.3% | 2.1% |
| July | 9.1% | 15.9% | 14.4% | 47.9% | 6.5% | 3.3% | 2.1% |
| June | 7.1% | 18.7% | 14.9% | 47.3% | 6.0% | 3.1% | 2.1% |
| May | 5.2% | 21.3% | 14.5% | 47.7% | 5.5% | 3.0% | 2.2% |
| April | 3.5% | 23.2% | 15.4% | 47.1% | 4.9% | 3.0% | 2.2% |
| March | 1.4% | 24.9% | 17.0% | 46.5% | 4.2% | 3.1% | 2.3% |
| February | 0.8% | 25.4% | 17.4% | 46.4% | 4.0% | 3.0% | 2.2% |
| January | 0.6% | 25.7% | 18.5% | 45.5% | 3.9% | 3.0% | 2.3% |
| 2008 | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera |
| December | 26.1% | 19.6% | 44.4% | 3.6% | 2.7% | 2.4% | |
| November | 26.6% | 20.0% | 44.2% | 3.1% | 2.7% | 2.3% | |
| October | 26.9% | 20.2% | 44.0% | 3.0% | 2.8% | 2.2% | |
| September | 26.3% | 22.3% | 42.6% | 3.1% | 2.7% | 2.0% | |
| August | 26.0% | 24.5% | 43.7% | 2.6% | 2. |
Complete Table at W3CSchools
Perhaps even more significant has been the reaction of Web developers. The above table shows the use of browsers at the very popular W3CSchools website that has all sorts of great tips and tutorials on basic HTML, CSS, DOM and JavaScript. Note how IE has drastically lost market share in recent months to the Chrome, FireFox, Safari, and Opera browsers. With smartphones and mobile devices toting ever larger screens and clearer screens, their popularity is integrated with browser access to the Web. And the major competitive browsershave put even more pressure on Microsoft by implementing many of the key HTML5 and other browser standards like Canvas, SVG, JavaScripts E4X, CSS3, etc. Finally the emergence of Cloud Computing could cause its corporate clientele to breakaway from the Microsoft Windows and Office taxes and adopt SaaS with a Web browser and low cost, very fast, and mobile Netbooks – hmm, sounds like the Google Chrome OS solution.
So push has come to shove and the recent announcement of IE9 shows that Microsoft is re-entering the browser wars fray – a little late, a long ways behind on standards [even Microsoft is admitting this, see its Acid 3graphic on its main IE9 test drive page]. But there is a lot of good news. Much improved performance for JavaScript including new DOM event coding and styling support. Lots of gotchas in DOM and CSS elimianted. More HTML 5 commitments including SVG support Updates every 6-8 weeks for the IE9 trial versions. Speed of processing improvement by using GPU and spare CPU cycles and cores. Just a cursory IE9 Test drive also shows the speed of the browser comparable to Chrome and Firefox on some script and CSS intensive websites in comparison to very slow IE8.
The bad news is that IE9 can also be very slow on on some JavaScript and CSS intensive sites. IE9 does not support E4X yet. It does not do better than IE8 on most W3C CSS tests. And IE9 is currently not available for Win XP. despite the apparent openness of the IE9 Testdrive site, Redmond is still holding a lot of the specs and schedules for release fairly tight to their vest. So this observer is still from Missouri on IE9 and how much and quickly it will be an improvement over IE8.
Summary
Microsoft is playing from behind in 3 major markets [4 if you consider Bing versus Google search]. But Microsoft has played from behind and won big time in desktop OS, word processing, spreadsheets, Web browsers, BI software, etc. However, with the exception of BI software, Microsoft’s come-from-behind victories are all 10 or more years old. The above 3 problems will really put Redmond to the test. In every case, Microsoft has lost its Brand advantage of positive mindshare and technology competence if not leadership. In every market, Steve Ballmer is going to have to say and convince skeptical players to “Trust us, Trust us, Trust us”.
Now Microsoft has some very anxious and needy hardware and software suppliers, a marketing team noted for chutzpah and flair, still strong corporate IT support, plus a $36 billion kitty to help “make it all so”. But unlike in the past, Microsoft does not have clientele and consumers believing the company will do the right thing – Vista, IE, and the Windows Mobile abrupt change in directions are symptoms of that malaise. But also Microsoft faces a skeptical IT Press and Gadget Media. Call it the Wall Street Hangover – people are just very, very skeptical of corporate elites who seem to be putting their own immediate profit results well above doing the right thing for customers and other company stakeholders. In the 1980′s and most of the 1990′s, Redmond would do pretty well on the “Trust Us” measure; now – not so good.
So here are my prognostications on Ballmer’s 3 problems. 1)Windows 7 will get rescued but at the cost of the rise of Apple, Linux and SaaS to 15-25% market share in and around the desktop. 2)Windows Mobile will be very lucky to make it through this next year with 10% market share [see here for just a few of the latest problems]. 3)IE 9 will help Windows 7 since Win XP will not run IE9 and certainly will stop the browser market share bleeding if delivered as specified . But Redmond, as noted above, has always been ambiguous about the Web; so I fully expect a series of gosh awful gotchas to emerge with IE9. Hence, the “Trust Us” problem recurs.
Posted in 
Defensive Specialist Steve Ballmer – Resign?
Its all the news chatter in the IT trade and business trade press when Newsweek had the temerity to suggest that Steve Ballmer should be asked to resign by the directors at Microsoft. Here is the essence of the argument:
Ballmer’s 10th anniversary as CEO of Microsoft arrives in January, but it’s hard to imagine he’ll be celebrating. Microsoft stock has dropped by nearly 50 percent on his watch, lagging not just other tech companies but even the Dow Jones industrial average. Distracted by the Windows Vista fiasco, Ballmer has missed every big new tech market of the past decade. Google won the race for Internet search and keyword advertising. Apple won in MP3 players and online music sales, and now holds the high ground in mobile phones, while Windows Mobile fades away. Microsoft’s Zune music player is a dud. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, will never catch Google. Ballmer is said to be a brilliant guy, but he got a black eye for the way he blundered and blustered and finally botched an attempted acquisition of Yahoo. He’s a screamer and a bit of a bully–not the easiest guy to work for. If Microsoft were any other company, this guy would be in trouble. But the catch is, Ballmer was put into the job by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and the two have been pals since their undergraduate days at Harvard. If Gates wants to get rid of Ballmer, he’ll have to craft some kind of graceful exit that lets his buddy save face. Another problem: there’s no heir apparent on the management team.
And here is the reaction, very revealing, in the trade and business press:
Computerworld Preston Gralla – says Steve’s a sales guy, not an innovator in an era of hyperchange.
HBR/INSEAD Top 200 Worldwide CEOs – Steve is famously absent from this list.
Microsoft Watch – rehashes “markedly mixed results but friend of Bill and no successor” ideas.
All About Microsoft – ZDNets Mary Jo Foley – No way, expect 10 more years of Steve.
Seattle Times – just the facts, mame, just the facts on Microsoft’s fortunes under Ballmer.
theRegister - a no holds barred look at how well Steve Ballmer did in a tumultuous decade.
The consensus is that Steve missed or fumbled the ball on many new ventures during the past decade. But this misses the point – Steve has not been brought in as CEO for his offensive and innovative prowess; rather he is the master salesmen, defensive specialist and clean-up artist.
Steve Ballmer is a Defensive Specialist
Bill Gates is still the chairman of Microsoft and still the CTO and longterm Software Architect [despite Ray Ozzie or Craig Mundie or whomever]. Bill is betting in an era of hyper-change, it is better to continue using Microsoft’s “we-clone-and grab-market-share-better-than anybody” strategy rather than to get burned with big innovation expenditures. And with Redmond’s monopolies on the desktop, browser, Exchange, and Office desktop , all the would be players have to come through us to get traction in the IT market. What Microsoft needs is a master salesmen and defensive specialist. Now look at Steve Ballmer’s record in that light.
First and foremost Steve Ballmer got the corporation through all the antitrust and legal attacks with barely a sweat. So Redmond have paid out $5-8 billion [depending on who is doing the counting]. But look at the benefits. Netscape and Java absolutely neutralized. Innovation and new standards on the Web – under our thumb. The pen, gestures and tablet market: Redmonds to define. But most important of all a pit bull patent and legal reputation such that venture capital and consulting firms have steered clients and prospective start-ups away from markets that Microsoft was in or might just want to be in.
Also, in the first 3 years of Steve’s tenure, Microsoft software was plagued with worms and virus attacks of unprecedented nature. Yet businesses stuck with the culprits like Windows, Windows Server, Exchange, and Internet Explorer. Microsoft did not lose market share but rather gained stronger monopolies as IE went to 95% market share. Ditto for Windows desktop. From 2001 to 2007, Microsoft made no feature improvements to IE and stalled on almost all Web standards developments from HTML through CSS to JavaScript. With Steve’s defensive skills – IE has still remained a monopoly with more than 60% market share while maintaining the idea that” software always runs best in Windows” despite the gains of Web 2.0. Great defensive play.
Need another, example? Office had nothing but cosmetic improvements from 97 through Office 2003. Since late 2002 Sun has been giving away for free Open Office which reads and writes all the latest Office file formats. Open Office runs on 4 platforms – Windows, Apple, LInux, Solaris. Yet has Microsoft Office lost market share? Barely despite those Apple ads and the onslaught of freebie online tools. Talk about great defense!
Lets look at the Apple and their silly ads. Vista has been a downer with clearly bloated memory requirements, still bad security comparison with Apple, and slower speed of operations than even Windows XP. And lets not mention the Vista kludge on ease of operation, since Windows 7 solved those problem by means of the Redmond’s tactics of clone, clone, clone MacOS and its UI. And Steve got Steve Jobs to raise Apple prices while he quietly worked to lower PC prices dramatically such that when Windows 7 launched an equivalent Apple Mac cost 2.5 to 4 times as much as a Windows 7 PC. Talk about a brilliant sales and defensive maneuver – watch for the quarterly results for Microsoft.
Steve Ballmer on Offense
And don’t tell us Steve Ballmer has no offensive skills. Look at the bloody beating IBM and its Notes operation is taking with Exchange, Infopath and Redmonds other messaging products. And look at Sharepoint from zero to a $2 Billion a year business. And with Steve’s developers, developers, developers message Microsoft Project and Visio have wiped out all opposition. And SQL Server with it free BI add-ons continues to gain market share despite losing best SQL benchmarks and having a Windows Server-only marketplace.
Yes, Steve has seen others dominate the search and online advertising markets – but Steve has brilliantly redefined Search as Search, Problem-Solve and Decide – and with Bing, Yahoo, and other tools to define the format and layout of those steps in an arena, GUI and Styling, where Google has no prowess or expertise. And as for gadgets, games, and mobile phones, Microsoft is best at catch up and surpass. Redmond has done it many times to Apple [think Mac versus PC in current market share terms despite Mac's huge early technology lead] and is doing it now to Google in Search and Decide. Remember in a world of hyper-change , all Steve has to do is stay close and then when a market breaks towards one technology or another [think smartphones with plugins], use the next technology trend, attach it to his mobile phone or whatever – and use Redmonds existing monopolies to leverage to a dominant market share. Watch what Steve does to Amazon, Rackspace and salesforce.com with Azure and his Cloud Computing line-up.
So think of Steve as the Salesman and Defensive specialist while Bill remains as the Offensive Coordinator – spotting the IT trends, setting the packaging/pricing and deciding the right timing for entering and taking over a market. Now why would Microsoft’s Board, including Warren Buffet, want to break up this dream team ? Rather, the Board might want to ask the Offensive Coordinator to carry more of his fair share of the load.
NYTimes Gets Web 2.0 Technology; But …
Over the past two years the NYTimes has been showing an evergrowing Web 2.0 savvy. Like many of its large newspaper cohorts, the NYTimes is using such Web 2.0 fixtures as tabs, scrollers and accordions to make quick access to multiple stories on a single page. Its photo galleries use nifty Flash-enabled slideshow viewers.
But of late the NYTimes is stepping well beyond the “newspaper norm” and has been incorporating ever more sophisticated Web components and designs in the presentation of its news. Take the Business section:
The NYTimes portfolio app, stock screener, and analysis tools are as good as [if not better than] the best from the likes of CNBC, Morningstar or Google Finance. And there are plenty of supporting financial components:
These are savvy tools yet they are also very approachable. For stocks and financial analysis the NYTimes Business section has become my goto work environ – and iyts available for the cost of free registering.
The NYTimes has lots of extra goodies. Take the simple tab Summary of Markets:
Users can quickly move through the tabs and see a graphic summary of the markets they are interested in – and the time delay is not at all or minimal.
But the Web 2,0 sophistication does not end here. Take a look at the new Times Skimmer – which allows readers to scan through articles in the digital pages very quickly and efficiently:
The Skimmer has 3-4 different layouts which users can customize to scan through the Times very comfortably.
In sum, the NYTimes is using more and more sophisticated Web 2.0 tools to make its “All the news fit to print” much more approachable. So the NYTimes certainly gets the Tech/RIA side of Web 2.0 very well. But on the Social Networking side – not so well In effect, the NYTimes is still taking baby steps.
Social Networking Missteps
Yes there are more and more blogs which attract a steady stream of loyal readers to such info-venues as Goal, Living Lens and DealBook among 2 dozen very good blogs. Each of the blogs cultivates its readership with moderated comments, questions and highlights. And the NYTimes has its own social networking section, Times People.
But …. Times People does not fully connect yet. Not like other social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedln or even Business Week’s Business Exchange. First, Times People has no links to any of the popular Web Networks like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedln, etc. Second you cannot recommend anything other than NYTimes articles to your fellow Times People. In fact you cannot easily point/link to other media and info sources easily within Times People [Hint to Times People people - take a look at Business Week's Business Exchange, Aaardvark.com, and Ning.com for just a small sampler of Open Social Networking sites and what they offer their subscribers/members].
Finally, Times People does not integrate well a) with the NYTimes set of blogs nor b)with the great components and tools available in the other sections of the newspaper. I would love to use the NYTimes business and financial portfolio tools and results to make a point in any of the NYTimes blogs as well as Times People. Most of all I would love to have access to say SEC Edgar Financial figures, Wharton Economic data, Wolfram Web Alpha and other economic and social indicators so I could quickly fact check and/or marshal arguments
So give the NYTimes top marks for mastering the Web 2.0 components and mashables; but give the NYTimes only passing marks on mastering the People and Social Networking side of the Web. However, the social side is the toughest to tame – and given the rapid development of the RIA side, I fully expect the NYTimes with its great content and idea leaders to emerge as a major digital presence based on its “community for ideas” offerings.
Windows 7 Graphics PC: Benchmarks Versus Windows XP
The following posting is taken from our thePhotoFinishes.com blog verbatim. The performance results for Windows 7 versus Windows XP are of interest.
Well we spent most of the weekend trying to figure out our benchmarks results – would Windows 7 be able to beat Windows XP in raw speed and performance? Here is that tale of the table:
| Speed Comparison: Windows 7 versus Windows XP | ||
| Test | Windows 7 | Windows XP |
| Copy 800MB file from USB | 29sec | 27sec |
| Copy 800MB file to USB | 59sec | 52sec |
| Copy 800MB file to file | 25sec | 28sec |
| Copy 430MB directory USB to drive | 31sec | 68sec |
| Create 120,000 line .sql file using PHP | 6sec | 12 sec |
| Insert 120,000 records into MySQL Table SQL | 46 min 05sec | 140sec |
| Select 120,000 records with filterand group by | <1 sec | < 1 sec |
| Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table | 24min 11sec | 68sec |
| Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table SQL | 275sec | 16sec |
| Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table PHP | 291sec | 18sec |
| Left Join between Product and Supplier Tables | <1 sec | <1 sec |
| Premiere Elements Boot up | 29 sec | 25sec |
| Premiere Elements Analyze Scene | 200 sec | 190sec |
| Premiere Elements write FLV 10min clip 640 x 480 | 630sec | 428sec |
| Photoshop CS3 First Boot up | 14sec | 12sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Smart Blur 14MPixel image | 16sec | 12sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Finishing Impressionist 14MPixel image | 9sec | 6sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Finishing Filter Gallery 14MPixel image | 15sec | 9sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Finishing \impressionist 24MPixel image | 31sec | 25sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Crop, Resize, Shape, Color Correct | <1 sec | <1 sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Brighteness, Exposure, Sharpen | <1 sec | <1 sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Topaz Smart Sharpen 26MPixel image | 20sec | 18sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Reshape 26MPixel image | 160sec | 154sec |
| Photoshop CS3-Texture Finishing 26MPixel image | 44sec | 36sec |
Green shows the faster performer and red marks where the speed of a system is 2 or more times slower than the other. Two things are obvious from these benchmarks. Windows XP on a 2.26GHz Dual Core PC with 3GB of RAM plus a 250GB hard drive consistently outperforms Windows 7 on 2.10GHz Dual Core PC with 4GB of RAM plus a 500GB SATA hard drive.
Well of course Windows XP does, it has a faster CPU. Well, not exactly.
I looked up the Passmark ratings of the two CPUs and the Windows XP Dual Core is rated at 1046 while the Windows 7 is rated at 1251. So theoretically, such a slight performance advantages of Windows XP remains an anomaly. But what is of real concern is the very poor performance of Windows 7 doing Web development tasks. PHP and MySQL ran significantly slower in Windows 7 using an XAMP . So I had to drag out PHPed and Xdebug to profile and debug the problems. To date I do not have any solutions or insights.
I was going to do some AutoCAD, Corel Draw, Java, JavaScript, Oracle and PostgreSQL benchmarking but the the Windows 7 problems with PHP and MySQL forced a delay in game penalty. If any readers have insights into the Windows 7 problems with PHP and/or MySQL please post a comment.
Summary of Benchmarks
On one hand Windows 7 on a Gateway with a 17.3 inch screen at $650 Canadian [before taxes] is a pleasure to work with. Users will have plenty of room to work in. And the new Windows 7 taskbar makes moving among apps a lot easier. The system had close to XP-like Boot up, Shutdown and Start-up or Hibernate restore times. And copy operations [ notably faster than XP] and open file popups are not painfully slow like in Vista. Also I have yet to run into the annoying Vista roller-coaster performance lags [bright and peppy for 20 minutes then slow as molasses in January for the next 25, then back to .....]. But I have to admit, it is galling to have to endure a 5-20% performance hit in photo and video editing when the new Windows 7 machine should be delivering the very opposite in performance.
Touch Screens to Rescue Windows 7?
It is prudent to be from Missouri about Windows 7. Yes, the advertising and many of the IT pundit websites are saying things like “The best Windows ever since Windows XP”, but still not its equal in speed and performance from current tests. Also these sound like the same praise poured on Vista less than 2 years ago. But lets face it, Microsoft is supporting a Windows XP mode of operation within Windows 7 precisely because Windows XP’s breadth of applications and hardware/peripheral compatibility will never be matched by Windows 7. Call it the XP Crutch.
Also the other underlying issue is that Windows 7 will not be People Ready for all those users clinging to a faster and more reliable Windows XP . These XP users will have a significant learning curve transitioning from XP to Windows 7. Hence predictions for transition to Windows 7 are not rosy. But there may be a “magic touch” that will lure both home and business users to Windows 7 – touchscreen operations with multi-touch capabilities.
HP certainly thinks so and is launching an armada of touch enabled desktops and semi-laptops with those capabilities. This touch-screen lure and a good teaching program may make Windows 7 much more palatable; even given that it will likely be slower than Windows XP. This could be the breakthru “glitz” for Windows 7.
More interesting – look who is outside looking in on client OS multi-touch innovation – Apple!