Every storm cloud has a silver lining, and the whirlwind that has wreaked havoc with the world’s Alice in Plunderland financial system may yet prove a blessing for Windows users.
If users were reluctant to upgrade to Vista, they may well be even more slow to move to the new flavour – currently known as Windows 7. There is always an initial sluggishness following the launch of a new iteration while the buying public digests the contents of reviewers’ opinions. Some people await the launch of the first Service Pack rather then wrestle with software gremlins.
But this time there’s a new hurdle: in an uncertain economic climate, people will tend to hold on that bit longer to their current workhorse, be it Windows Vista or Windows XP.
On the face of it this is bad news for Microsoft, particularly in the wake of Vista’s disappointing sales performance to date. But another way of looking at the situation is that Redmond, in expectation of a cool reception, could delay releasing Windows 7 (as Microsoft now says it will be called) in order to iron out the glitches that inevitably mar a new Windows release.
This is what Redmond ought to have done with Vista. Indeed, if we look back at Longhorn (eventually released as Windows Server 2008) we see that the development programme had hit a turbulent patch in 2004. In its haste to get back on track, the development team was stampeded into doing exactly what Bill Gates had said they would not do: allow a targeted release date to set the pace of development instead of deciding to let it out of its box only when the wrinkles had been fully ironed out.
Judging by Vista’s track record, Microsoft made the same mistake again.
Windows 7 is “reliably rumoured” to be slated for release late next year or early in 2010. However, if the financial pundits are right in their predictions, the world will at that time still be mired in recession logjam, in which case there seems little point in rushing out a new version of the operating system. Instead, Microsoft should spend more time tinkering with it to give us an OS we really enjoy using at a time when we’re all ready to shell out for it.
Has Microsoft finally learnt the lesson of previous false starts? We’ll see.
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