blogs.techrepublic.com.com – 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.
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 they don’t have to.
There’s more, you should really read it, I have Vista and though it works…its a pain in the ass – Proxima
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