An early build of Windows 7 is now in the hands of thousands of software developers, who got code at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Major hardware manufacturers already have copies, but many more will get them at WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, which opens in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
Microsoft is providing tonnes of information, so I hope they’re paying attention. Windows, uniquely, has to work on PCs from more than 10,000 companies, and run well over 1 million applications for roughly a billion users. It has to handle everything from tiny handhelds to the large rack-based servers that run major corporations. Indeed, you can build your own PC and expect Windows to work on it.
It’s no secret that too few suppliers paid attention to the last version, Windows Vista, which therefore got off to a bad start. Badly written software either didn’t work correctly or kept bringing up pointless alerts from Vista’s UAC (User Account Control) security feature. Some components and peripherals either had no drivers, or worse, had really bad drivers. Some PC manufacturers were slugging Vista systems with old software written for XP. Many other problems came from Microsoft’s failure to deliver what had been expected — and when.
It took the best part of a year (and a lot of investment) to solve these problems, so that today, Vista SP1 is far better than the original — and far better than its reputation. To give just one example, the Windows Engineering blog points out that the number of applications and tasks that generate a UAC prompt fell from 775,312 at launch to 168,149 in August this year, and the number is still falling.
Of course, changing Windows isn’t like remodeling a boutique, it’s more like redesigning a city. It involves moving well over 90 percent of the whole microcomputer industry, some of which is highly resistant to change. It takes time.
The good news about Windows 7 is that it maintains compatibility with Vista device drivers and software, according to John Curran, who heads the Windows Client Group at Microsoft UK. It will therefore benefit from Vista’s problems in the same way that XP benefited from Windows 2000’s.
What else it contains remains to be seen, because Microsoft has changed the way Windows 7 is built. With Vista, features were pretty much added through a “top down” process, which was uneven at best. With Windows 7, development is “bottom up,” and teams are not allowed to add their feature to the main build until it has been both coded and tested. You may end up with fewer features, but the quality should be consistently higher.
Since builds are not “feature complete,” it’s hard to say what Windows 7 will include. We know that it will have a much improved UAC and better management of drivers and devices. We know it will have multi-touch features and gesture recognition. We know some parts will have ribbon interfaces: Windows is now being run by Steve Sinofsky, who was ultimately responsible for the ribbons in the hugely successful Office 2007.
Either way, it should do well. It doesn’t matter if it’s not a big upgrade on Vista, because 64-bit Windows 7 is a very big upgrade for the 80 percent of the market that is still using 32-bit Windows XP.
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