Yesterday ars technica published a brilliant introduction to Windows 7, a brilliant summary of Microsoft’s first public demonstration of Windows 7.

Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. ars technica writes that the user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago. I am not sure, from the screenshots, I would rather say that the GUI is a continued development of the one introduced with Vista.

ars technica then continues with one of the best paragraphs I’ve read about Microsoft and Windows:

Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven’t updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated.

So, so true. Most online tech sites had not had a grip/clue about Windows Vista. It’s been comments like stay away from Vista, continue with XP and it’s now time to move to another OS. One of the biggest problems with Vista that I and my co-workers have experienced is the fact that many of the software vendors on the Windows platform are lazy! Lots of old software will not run on Vista, cause of the introduction of Vista’s new set of extensive security features, User Accounts Control (UAC). Third party developers don’t fix their software, or rather don’t rewrite their software according to the guidelines that come with each new version of Windows. It’s horrible to see that some companies are still trying to sell software that was basically written for Windows 95/98.

Microsoft has done a lot to help the lazy developers with compatibility modes and shims, and we can only hope that the software houses by now have understood the importance of coding guidelines and that UAC is here to stay. Microsoft will continue this work with Windows 7, and the next version of the OS will improve on Vista’s compatibility manager by making it smarter. Improved “shim” technology will allow the new compatibility manager to figure out what’s causing an application compatibility issue, and recommend the fix.

Time to head to the office again, and migrate more users from XP to Vista. Yesterday I started looking in to Vista x64, bought upgrades of Stata 10 MP (25 dollars per license, going from x32 to x64). Sadly, there wasn’t much of news about Windows 7 and x64 support, other then Head of Windows Product Management, Mike Nash, saying:

64-bit software is used more and more, at least consumers are often buying computers with more then 4 GB RAM.

Of course Windows 7 will support x64, but I wonder will x64 be default and x32 be made available for older computers? Will the installer analyse the hardware and automatically choose a x64 bit version of the OS if the CPU supports it?

Want to read more about Windows 7? Thought so, here is one link:
Why Windows 7 Will Suck Less Than Vista – Extremetech