Seven of nine

Pro

Talk to many IT professionals about Windows Vista and you’ll hear a common set of grumbles – it’s slow and unwieldy to run, badly supported by hardware drivers, and suffers from a range of application compatibility issues.

Or at least it did when it was launched in 2007. Most balanced observers will now tell you that with the release of service pack one in February 2008, Vista became more reliable and more widely supported, and was generally rehabilitated. By that stage, however, the damage had been done.

With the launch of Windows 7 now on the horizon, Microsoft is taking no chances. It knows that Vista suffers from a serious public relations problem, so despite the many technical similarities between the two operating systems, you can expect to hear lots of talk about why seven times is a charm.

Orphan adoption
“It’s a fact that Vista didn’t get the adoption rates expected of it, but it’s also a fact that many of the problems identified with it are no longer present, and that Windows 7 suffers from none of them,” said Ronald Dockery, client business group lead with Microsoft Ireland.

“There was an issue with Vista when it was first released to do with application compatibility – partly because OEMs had to catch up with the operating system and partly because Vista was a complete rewrite and had nothing in common with Windows XP.”

“Regardless, service pack one doubled the number of applications supported and a lot of those issues went away. People who didn’t see the business case for upgrading to Vista should look again at Windows 7 – it’s faster, cheaper to run, more stable and has more management tools,” said Dockery.

Microsoft is certainly hoping that the business case adds up. The company’s sales dropped six per cent in the first three months of 2009 — its first quarterly drop in 23 years as a public company. Against this backdrop, the company made a beta of Windows 7 available for public testing in January and was swamped with interest.

The beta is no longer publicly available, but a new release candidate of the OS is due soon. The consensus from road testers, bloggers and industry commentators has been unusually positive for an OS still at beta stage. Windows 7 is reported to be faster, more stable, backwardly compatible with Vista-friendly hardware and software and, all round, simply a solid product.

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