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http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/h...664&tag=nl.e138
Prediction: Microsoft will leapfrog Vista, release Windows 7 early, and change its OS business
• Date: April 21st, 2008
• Author: Jason Hiner
Microsoft is nothing if not responsive to its customers. In fact, it’s hyper-responsive. That’s why we’ve ended up with feature-bloat in both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office as the company has tried to please everyone by including everything-but-the-kitchen-sink in its software.
And that’s why Microsoft will ultimately try to quell the embarrassing Windows Vista debacle by making a bold move with Windows 7 to win back customer loyalty and generate positive spin for its most important product.
What will happen next?
My prognosis is that Microsoft will use smoke and mirrors to conjure up an early release of Windows 7, the next edition of the world’s most widely-used operating system. Then they will quietly and unofficially allow IT departments to migrate straight from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has already alluded to this and IT departments have certainly welcomed that idea, since most of them have found very few reasons to migrate to Vista — although my colleague John Sheesley recently argued the devil’s advocate position for IT departments to adopt Vista.
To be clear, I am not predicting that Microsoft will do a quick-and-massive overhaul of Windows Vista in the next 12 months. Instead, I think we’ll see Microsoft do the following:
• Strip out or minimize some of Windows Vista’s clunkiest features — especially User Account Control
• Simplify the interface back to something closer to Windows XP
• Reduce backward compatibility in order to streamline the code base
• Work much harder with vendors to ensure driver and software compatibility with new hardware and applications
• Reduce the cost of Windows in retail boxes in order to generate goodwill and undercut Mac OS X (meanwhile, this will have little effect on the price of enterprise licensing, which is already much cheaper than retail)
• Learn from the long delay of Windows Vista and move to an incremental release model with a subscription and at least one major update per year. Financially, most IT departments are already on a subscription plan. Now look for Microsoft to move consumers in this direction.
• Release Windows 7 by the end of 2009 and market it as the simplest and easiest Windows ever
This will be Windows Vista Service Pack 2 but with a new Windows name, a new marketing campaign, and a new release model. Naturally, Microsoft won’t fool many IT departments or hard core techies with this type of move, but it doesn’t have to.
If Microsoft does it right, this will create a general sense that it “fixed” Windows and will create an OS that is more modular and more versatile so that it can thrive on more types of devices, from things like the Eee PC and the HP 2133 Mini-Note to high-end laptops and desktops.
If you want evidence to support this theory, look no further than the circumstances that created and led to the evolution of Windows XP, which currently dominates about 80% of computers.
Remember the circumstances surrounding Windows XP?
Windows 2000 was supposed to be the version of Windows that unified the two code bases: Windows NT and Windows 9x. It was named Windows 2000 so that it would be seen as the obvious successor to Windows 98, which was much more widely deployed than Windows NT 4.0, the code base that made up the foundation of Windows 2000. However, as deadlines were missed and features had to be dumped, the concept of codebase unification was one of the casualties.
That left Microsoft with Windows 2000 Professional as the clear successor to Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, while Windows 98 still enjoyed a far larger installed base and thus most of the hardware and software vendors tailored their solutions to that OS. Windows 2000 Pro was not widely adopted, despite the fact that it may have been one of the highest quality client OS releases that Microsoft has ever done.
Microsoft’s update to Windows 98 was called Windows Me, and it had an ever lower adoption rate than Windows 2000. Users, businesses, and IT departments simply were not interested in either of these two operating systems. They stuck to their guns and stayed with Windows 98 in large numbers. Is any of this sounding familiar?
As a result, Microsoft sped up the next release of Windows 2000 and re-focused it on unifying the two codebases. The result was Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional. Despite a lot of initial concerns about Product Activation (which was introduced with Windows XP), the OS itself satisfied users and IT departments enough that it became a natural choice to upgrade when it came time to replace hardware.
One of the primary motivators for naming Windows XP — the “XP” stood for “eXPerience” — was to get away from the year designations (Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000) and create a product that would be upgraded incrementally and purchased via subscription. So, the idea of creating an operating system that would rely on incremental releases rather than a shiny new box every 3-4 years is definitely not new for Microsoft.
The first problem with that was that while Microsoft was talking about that ideological shift during the release of Windows XP, there was already a group of developers working on the next major release of Windows (it was code-named “Longhorn” back then and eventually became Vista). The status quo executives inside Microsoft decided that they wanted to keep doing standard OS releases because there was too much money at stake to change the business model too rapidly.
Prediction: Microsoft will leapfrog Vista, release Windows 7 early, and change its OS business
• Date: April 21st, 2008
• Author: Jason Hiner
Microsoft is nothing if not responsive to its customers. In fact, it’s hyper-responsive. That’s why we’ve ended up with feature-bloat in both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office as the company has tried to please everyone by including everything-but-the-kitchen-sink in its software.
And that’s why Microsoft will ultimately try to quell the embarrassing Windows Vista debacle by making a bold move with Windows 7 to win back customer loyalty and generate positive spin for its most important product.
What will happen next?
My prognosis is that Microsoft will use smoke and mirrors to conjure up an early release of Windows 7, the next edition of the world’s most widely-used operating system. Then they will quietly and unofficially allow IT departments to migrate straight from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has already alluded to this and IT departments have certainly welcomed that idea, since most of them have found very few reasons to migrate to Vista — although my colleague John Sheesley recently argued the devil’s advocate position for IT departments to adopt Vista.
To be clear, I am not predicting that Microsoft will do a quick-and-massive overhaul of Windows Vista in the next 12 months. Instead, I think we’ll see Microsoft do the following:
• Strip out or minimize some of Windows Vista’s clunkiest features — especially User Account Control
• Simplify the interface back to something closer to Windows XP
• Reduce backward compatibility in order to streamline the code base
• Work much harder with vendors to ensure driver and software compatibility with new hardware and applications
• Reduce the cost of Windows in retail boxes in order to generate goodwill and undercut Mac OS X (meanwhile, this will have little effect on the price of enterprise licensing, which is already much cheaper than retail)
• Learn from the long delay of Windows Vista and move to an incremental release model with a subscription and at least one major update per year. Financially, most IT departments are already on a subscription plan. Now look for Microsoft to move consumers in this direction.
• Release Windows 7 by the end of 2009 and market it as the simplest and easiest Windows ever
This will be Windows Vista Service Pack 2 but with a new Windows name, a new marketing campaign, and a new release model. Naturally, Microsoft won’t fool many IT departments or hard core techies with this type of move, but it doesn’t have to.
If Microsoft does it right, this will create a general sense that it “fixed” Windows and will create an OS that is more modular and more versatile so that it can thrive on more types of devices, from things like the Eee PC and the HP 2133 Mini-Note to high-end laptops and desktops.
If you want evidence to support this theory, look no further than the circumstances that created and led to the evolution of Windows XP, which currently dominates about 80% of computers.
Remember the circumstances surrounding Windows XP?
Windows 2000 was supposed to be the version of Windows that unified the two code bases: Windows NT and Windows 9x. It was named Windows 2000 so that it would be seen as the obvious successor to Windows 98, which was much more widely deployed than Windows NT 4.0, the code base that made up the foundation of Windows 2000. However, as deadlines were missed and features had to be dumped, the concept of codebase unification was one of the casualties.
That left Microsoft with Windows 2000 Professional as the clear successor to Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, while Windows 98 still enjoyed a far larger installed base and thus most of the hardware and software vendors tailored their solutions to that OS. Windows 2000 Pro was not widely adopted, despite the fact that it may have been one of the highest quality client OS releases that Microsoft has ever done.
Microsoft’s update to Windows 98 was called Windows Me, and it had an ever lower adoption rate than Windows 2000. Users, businesses, and IT departments simply were not interested in either of these two operating systems. They stuck to their guns and stayed with Windows 98 in large numbers. Is any of this sounding familiar?
As a result, Microsoft sped up the next release of Windows 2000 and re-focused it on unifying the two codebases. The result was Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional. Despite a lot of initial concerns about Product Activation (which was introduced with Windows XP), the OS itself satisfied users and IT departments enough that it became a natural choice to upgrade when it came time to replace hardware.
One of the primary motivators for naming Windows XP — the “XP” stood for “eXPerience” — was to get away from the year designations (Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000) and create a product that would be upgraded incrementally and purchased via subscription. So, the idea of creating an operating system that would rely on incremental releases rather than a shiny new box every 3-4 years is definitely not new for Microsoft.
The first problem with that was that while Microsoft was talking about that ideological shift during the release of Windows XP, there was already a group of developers working on the next major release of Windows (it was code-named “Longhorn” back then and eventually became Vista). The status quo executives inside Microsoft decided that they wanted to keep doing standard OS releases because there was too much money at stake to change the business model too rapidly.
