As Windows 7 draws closer will its impact mirror that of Vista?

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

September 7 is the date Microsoft has decided it will allow its business customers to place orders for Windows 7, due out in October. The biggest question is whether the industry will be dealt another Windows Vista. Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I think Windows 7 has the potential to be one of the best Microsoft product releases since XP.

What's definitely needed is more innovation on the desktop and Microsoft must position itself to deliver.

Tech innovation in recent years has been in the cloud and we're all benefiting from it. Software-as-a-service and social networking – delivered by the “cloud computing” concept – have redefined what people expect from the Internet.

And browser innovation has kept pace with this shift away from the desktop to the Web.

Now, I'm not about to go out on a limb and say the desktop is obsolete or irrelevant, it's just been neglected.

Microsoft, Apple and the open source projects (GNOME and KDE are the big two desktops) all need to up their game.

The quagmire Microsoft has got itself into has as much to do with Windows' release cycle than the trend away from the desktop.

Windows XP, released back in 2001, became the company's standard as businesses and consumers moved from the Windows 9x releases in the 90s.

Ironically, one of Microsoft's greatest strengths – backward compatibility – may have been its greatest undoing.

Sure it's great that many Win32 applications will run on Windows 9x, XP or Vista, but that doesn't help drive innovation, nor give people much of an incentive to upgrade.

To remedy this, Microsoft will use the Apple's method of easing applications onto modern platforms by emulating a previous app environment. In Apple's case it supported Mac OS 9 apps with “Classic mode” for Mac OS X , in Microsoft's case it will be so-called “Seamless XP” mode.

This might not be the best solution for legacy applications (and some many not work as expected), but at the very least it gives developers more incentive to their modernise their code. And it's more palatable to end-users than the old end-of-life trick!

Due to its long and dry Windows release cycle, Microsoft has also trapped itself between a rock and hard place. It wants to cut off support for older versions, but since XP remains so popular to guillotine it involves upsetting (and potentially alienating) a large portion of its customer base.

At the very least, Windows 7 should be more of a compelling reason to upgrade (it doesn't require a PC upgrade just to run it, for starters) than Vista, but for Microsoft to maintain its desktop hegemony it must adopt a faster release cycle.

In addition to all the product news, another survey surfaced reporting most companies won't upgrade to Windows 7 with some 81 per cent of respondents citing “time and resources” or “application compatibility concerns” as the biggest barriers to deploying the new OS.

IDC on the other had is more optimistic saying about 50 per cent of all Windows shipments to businesses will be Windows 7 by 2011.

Whatever the numbers, Microsoft has surely learned an important lesson about product development.

Mac OS X and Linux may still be niche, but new releases are powering ahead with Blitzkrieg-like efficiency while Windows has remained largely stagnant.

For true innovation to return to the desktop, Windows must host release parties more often.