"If you're coming from a Mac, you'll—-hahahahaha. But seriously, even the Mactards will have to tone down their nasal David Spadian snide, at least a little bit."
For a second there I thought it was going to be a serious article.
It's obviously not a good article, it's obviously highly biased against Apple, which means it's either pro MS or pro Open Source, and it certainly didn't appear to be promoting the open source movement from how much I could tolerate of the article.
I stopped there, too. I guess I haven't read enough gizmodo to have expected it.
Later, I brought myself to read the whole article and it was better... Still, considering the alternative's to Windows available these days -- the article doesn't persuade me at all.
This is the team that went around at CES turning off displays with a universal remote of sorts.... they aren't exactly the pinnacle of online journalism.
"Microsoft, just fix the unwieldy Control Panel interface, please."
That screenshot is not accurate. You have to work to get it that ugly. (That is, he change the "View by" to large icons). The control panel is incredibly usable with its default layout.
I didn't read the rest of it, no point. I'm using Windows 7 right now and it's great. It puts XP and Vista to shame.
I'm running all three. And to be honest, I don't notice that many differences between Vista and Windows 7 beyond the task bar. Maybe the differences are there, but I don't notice them.
There are a lot of little things missing in XP that annoy me.
My feeling is that all the positive stuff about 7 wells up from the Microsoft marketing buzz. Not a bad thing, since all of the negative stuff about Vista was anti-Microsoft marketing buzz. But it's just as content free.
I have a theory that at least half the improvements from Win7 have been quietly slipped into Vista without telling anyone. Or vice versa.
For me Vista with it's latest updates is rock solid, fast and slick. I want to update to Win7 but I'm having trouble justifying it to myself (mainly just the time factor, but I also think MS pricing is outrageous - they are about double what they should be).
As someone who officially became a desktop OS interface nerd while playing with Dynapad (http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab/dynapad.htm), it frustrates me how risk averse the big OS vendors are. They have all the market share, infrastructure, marketing, and engineering talent to pull of something really incredible, but they opt not to do so.
I understand that they don't want to disrupt their user base with something too radical. That makes sense to me. However, with the next version of Windows, Microsoft had nothing to lose. Everyone hated Vista and most people avoided upgrading to it. Why not treat this failure as a huge opportunity to do something new and interesting?
They could have pushed the state of the art of desktop operating systems way forward, and possibly taken away that smug feeling of superiority us Mac users have enjoyed for years. Instead they just polished up a subset of Vista's warts. Oh well.
Look at how much crap they got and get over the Ribbon, something which almost all of the people who use it regularly love.
Changing things that people are invested in is hard. They don't like change, and don't like it when you force it upon them.
Also, most large changes need to be done slowly. If they make a big (risky) change from Vista->Win7, it will seem much larger (and much riskier) from XP->Win7.
I want to second this. I know people who are new to the ribbon seem to hate it, but I love it. And just today I installed a new scanner at work and was pleased to see that it also has a new ribbon interface. Replacing the old windows menus the company had two product generations ago.
Bad pdf links and no screenshots at that website. Dissertation on same here from 2006 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1195569 but it's behind a paywall. It does sound interesting - if the project has gained a new name or other resources exist I'd like to know more.
You're describing Microsoft's Longhorn project, at least in the beginning. It was going to be a whole new everything, with advanced features like WinFS getting shelved as the project schedule kept slipping, ultimately ending as the half-baked XP facelift known as Vista.
Longhorn was never slated to be nearly as revolutionary as what I had in mind. However, Longhorn's fate might prove wrong my statement about Microsoft's engineering (management) talent.
If I remember correctly, there was much hype before Vista was released two, but it in real world usage, it soon slowed down a perfectly good computer within 1-2 months. I hope this is not the case with Windows 7 too.
It's fine. I was put off by Vista and stuck with XP at home, but after months of running the RC there are no signs of performance degradation. I've had one crash in all that time and I wish it would pop up a little bubble to inform me when the Wi-fi has died, rather than waiting for me to realize my pages aren't loading before looking at the screen. Otherwise I am a happy user.
My only real gripe is that it's expensive and I've gotten used to running the super mega ultimate edition or whatever it's called. It's just an OS, sell it for $99 and have done with it instead of pointless market segmentation which drives people to the torrents. You'll note that these criticisms are all to do with corporate rather than technical.
The RC has been out for a few months now, and that problem hasn't shown up. The Beta has been out for almost a year now, and that problem has not shown up.
I wonder if there's any speed improvement compared to XP/Vista after you've installed a dozen applications. It's almost ridiculous that it takes my PC up to five minutes from pushing the power button before I can start working.
For a second there I thought it was going to be a serious article.