Microsoft’s new Windows 7 is amazing. It’s super lightweight, slick, and it has a beautiful interface.
Windows 7 has some great new features, too, like drag to maximize Windows to take 50% or more of the screen. It has a cool auto-preview feature on the Taskbar, where if you hover over the Internet Explorer icon, it will show you thumbnails of all the windows you’ve opened, and you can select the one you want to pull up.
I would even go as far as saying that Microsoft Windows 7 is on the verge of offering a better operating system experience than Apple’s latest OS. If Microsoft can get the search feature to work instantly, I think they have a total winner on their hands. There is still the question of how to counter Apple’s iLife; more about that in a moment.
Overall, I would say this is easily the most significant launch in Microsoft’s history. The question is, how significant is significant?
In the past (that is, pre-Vista), people would line up their purchases of new hardware with the launch of a new operating system from Microsoft. We expected that the new software would require much more significant hardware requirements; therefore, it was expected that many people would buy a new computer along with their new OS.
Well, that was the past.
Microsoft’s new OS is so slick that it seems to run better on Windows XP-based machines. In other words, if you have a slow computer, you should try blowing the dust off of it and install Windows 7 on it and see how well it runs; you might be surprised. In my case, I took a new HP Mini, which came installed with Windows XP, dumped XP, and installed Windows 7. The machine runs incredibly fast (albeit the video is still not to my liking) and makes me question the importance of new hardware in Microsoft’s eyes. HP chose Windows XP for the Mini because Windows Vista’s hardware requirements are somewhat insane. If Windows 7 runs faster than Windows XP on lower-end hardware, how well does it run on high-end hardware, and does it matter to most people?
That's the question we're still trying to answer at HP, but it seems fairly clear that the days when people would line up to buy new hardware to go along with a new Microsoft Windows OS are probably over. I simply cannot see how Windows 7 will drive hardware sales. I believe that in order to drive hardware sales, we need to continue to come up with meaningful, slick, innovative designs that our customers will want to purchase at some point. In the meantime, I can see many people lining up to buy a retail version of Windows 7 to install on their current hardware, and that might be enough to keep them going for a while.
What really got me thinking was when I took an old red Envy notebook from back in the day and installed Windows 7 on it without a hitch. I used a couple of Vista drivers to clean it up, and it runs beautifully. It’s a perfect PC for my 6-year-old to putter around on now.
What about Apple’s iLife? So far, Microsoft doesn’t have a clear answer for it. The company’s Live services are meant to answer the Apple iLife solution, but Live is sorely lacking in a number of areas. Even though it now offers things like an easy-to-use Web development program, blogging, and so on, it’s just not as complete or as refined as iLife. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens there. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; if someone can develop an iLife competitor for the PC, they’ll make millions.
I do believe Microsoft’s new OS could lead to some strong competition for Apple—that is, if everyone involved plays their cards right.
So here are the questions I ask myself;
a) Is the operating system as meaningful as it once was, or will things like Google Android combined with Cloud Computing, Chrome, Google Docs, Windows Live, etc make the OS less significant?
b) Will the OS, especially Windows 7 drive new hardware sales? Two thoughts here; one is Windows 7 is faster than XP, so uhhh you could install 7 on your XP machine and kick ass again... The second thought is Windows 7 does enable new hardware features such as touch, which makes me think new hardware designs might be appealing in many cases...
c) Is a mini notebook with Windows 7 enough for most people?
