It’s Time For The Windows 7 Party!

I hope you’ve prepared the tabbouleh and gathered your demographically diverse gang of buddies around the breakfast bar, because it’s WINDOWS 7 PARTAY TIME. Yes, after working us into a frenzy with one of the most sphincter-clenchingly awful ad campaigns ever, Microsoft have dropped their new operating system on a waiting globe today.

Windows 7 is grabbing headlines for being Amazon’s most pre-ordered product ever, but the cynic in me thinks that this is more an indictment on the awfulness of Vista than it is the greatness of Windows 7 – I can see hordes of people frantically jabbing the pre-order button before a dialogue box comes up reading “A website wants to open content on this computer” as if to confirm their purchase. Maybe it’s all a giant marketing wheeze: create a product so awful that it makes your next product look amazing?

Wired have given Windows 7 an overall thumbs-up, even if they say it’s expensive and still can’t intuit what you want it to do when you pop in a USB stick (i.e. just open the damn folder). CNET pitted it against Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system, and Windows is marginally less good according to their reviewers, losing on value and unique features, but getting big love for its reliability. The Telegraph just wants to find a legal way of marrying this thing. And Yobie Benjamin of the San Francisco Chronicle files the most breathless, punctuation-happy appreciation of all: “In a phrase, Windows 7 is darn good… very good. A huge congratulations to the dev team in Redmond — Well done! In fact… very well done!” But Reuters point out that the reviews for Vista were good when it launched, with the former editor of PC World magazine particularly repentant. 

This new Windows has clearly been created with an eye on both touch-screen and cloud computing technologies. Using Aero Shake, a window can be shaken to clear away all other extraneous windows, and shaken again to bring them back – a recipe for RSI if using a mouse, pure Minority Report if using a touch-screen. Meanwhile CEO Steve Ballmer has described the four panes of the Windows logo as now being “three windows and a cloud”, and Ashley Highfield, Microsoft’s UK MD, said yesterday that Windows 7 “was a key strategic part of [Microsoft's] cloud vision”. The computing industry is also hoping that the launch will be the catalyst for renewed sales.

But as Jack Schofield notes in the Guardian, a recent survey showed that of 600 companies in the US, over three quarters of them were still using Windows XP – it’s still deeply embedded in business, and given the ballache that is upgrading from XP to 7, requiring a complete backup of files and a complete reinstallation of Windows, it’s going to be hard to persuade corporate to make the jump. Which? is meanwhile saying you should hold off anyway, given the number of patches that will be created over the coming year – but considering Microsoft was providing extensive new service packs for Vista just weeks ago, it’s clear that constant upgrades are now just a part of computing life.

I imagine that during the Windows 7 launch there have been a few Microsoft staffers wishing that Bill Gates was still on board. He was a great advert for Microsoft, always appearing like the reliable nerd who had already finished his computer class work so he could help you with yours, and thus instantly undoing Apple’s multicoloured minimal too-cool-for-schoolism and taunting adverts. Steve Ballmer on the other hand has been a bit of a nightmare over the last month, lumbering around like a giant genetically-modified sour grape, ungallantly gritting his teeth at the failure of Vista and lamely slagging off the competition. First he said “Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone”; then regarding e-readers, he scoffed: “We have a device for reading. It’s the most popular device in the world. It’s the PC”. He also recently grabbed an iPhone off a staff member at a company meeting, and pretended to stamp on it (OK, that’s quite funny).

But the best thing about Windows 7 so far is still this. Filthy:

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Sci-tech | October 22, 2009 12:03PM |