[opendtv] Opinion: M'soft must do better with Windows 8
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:51:57 -0500
Sounds like Win7 mostly fixes the problems that Vista introduced.
It looks like some enterprising people out there are writing software to permit
upgrading from WinXP to Win7, which Microsoft does not allow without competely
reinstalling everything.
http://www.laplink.com/pcmover/pcmoverupgradeassistant.html
Bert
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Opinion: M'soft must do better with Windows 8
Rick Merritt
(10/23/2009 12:08 AM EDT)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220900269
SAN JOSE, Calif. - It's a sad day for the PC industry when one of its giants
gets wide praise because it did not mess up in a big way. But that was the low
hurdle Windows 7 stepped over Thursday.
Yes it boots faster, it is more responsive, it rarely crashes and it has
support for touch screens. OEMs seem happy Microsoft is not putting a road
block on their way to selling the systems we have come to depend on, for better
or worse.
Imagine the response systems makers might have if Microsoft had actually
enabled some cool new ideas. Call me a curmudgeon but I think Microsoft is
resting on its monopolistic backside.
Rather than spending his time figuring out how to beat Google in Internet
search, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ought to be thinking about how he can
advance the computer industry upon which the bulk of his profits are made. I
know it's not a sexy, high growth market anymore, but it is his mega-franchise
to lose.
Plenty of contenders are knocking on the door from Nokia's Maemo to Google's
Android and Chrome OS and Intel's Moblin, hoping to be the interface of
tomorrow's mobile access devices. None are even close to unseating Windows, but
wait a few turns of the crank and that could change.
I know doing anything new in Windows is hard. There's a big fat eco-system of
hundreds if not thousands of different chip sets, systems, peripherals and
applications that have to move forward in step with the OS.
One engineer I talked to said he thinks that could have been the problem with
Windows Vista. In the last major rev of Windows, Microsoft changed the
underlying compositing engine, moved from 32- to 64-bits and introduced a new
security model. It may have been too much for the community to digest.
"Vista had a huge uphill fight to make things work with all the combinatorial
explosions of different hardware and apps you have," said Dale Gulick, a senior
PC chip engineer I have chatted with at several past WinHEC events. "With Win7,
they had a cleaner focus" on just optimizing the OS and making it stable again,
he said.
And it worked. "I've been using Win7 on my machine that I use all the time
since before the beta, and it's solid as a rock," he said.
I think Microsoft owes it to the PC industry from which-along with Intel--it
sucks the lion's share of profits to do better than it has with Windows 7. So
let's start our wish list. What would you like to see in Win8?
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