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Opinion: Windows 7 “could make using a PC meaningfully more pleasant”

As noted today on Twitter, a quick post before I head off to my next meeting. 

An interesting post this week forwarded to me from technologizer.com on Windows7, from Harry McCracken, providing “a hands-on look at an upgrade that could turn out to be all the things that Vista never was”…

“… the Windows 7 I’ve been exposed to over the past 48 hours is surprisingly crisp and coherent:

  • It aims for compatibility. As in, stuff that works with Vista will work with Windows 7, no updates or fixes required.
  • It tries to stay out of your way. [it] is full of features that let you tell the OS not to bother you with notifications and warnings.
  • It wants to make it easier to manage stuff–applications, documents, and more. … Windows 7 looks like it’ll do a nice job of letting you juggle apps and data more efficiently.
  • It’s connected. As in, it has a ton of networking-related features–it’s the first version of Windows that seems designed with the assumption that it’s for PCs that live on a network.
  • It’s surprisingly original. It ain’t just Steve Jobs that has contended that Windows Vista was a warmed-over knockoff of OS X 10.4 Tiger. Windows 7, however, is its own OS–you may end up loving it or hating it, but its new features have little in common with OS X 10.5 Leopard.

“Will the legions of Windows XP users who continue to spurn Vista find Windows 7 to be the upgrade they were waiting for? The version I’ve been using is too incomplete to let me come to any definitive conclusion. But if the new OS lives up to its considerable promise, it could be a meaningful step towards restoring Windows’ reputation. It’s not earthshaking and includes no landmark features–but it looks like it could make using a PC meaningfully more pleasant.”

Also of interest: Highlights from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 are available here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/pdc/default.mspx

Tags: Microsoft, blogs, Windows 7, Windows Vista, PDC 2008.

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