I'm not sure I agree with that parallel. ME was the end of a dead codeline, while a lot of what's good about 7 could not exist without Vista (example: the improved security model). Vista was just bitter medicine.
I think your opinion touches on a slightly deeper analysis than I intended. I'm only speaking about how it's use, acceptance and crappiness will be remembered, not the technological reasons behind it.
Once you change it to the old-style theme, remove the nag screens, and delete the junk that comes pre-installed on most comps, Vista is actually quite decent.
If MS had just shipped without the nag screens and with a lightweight desktop theme, I think the reception would have been very different. That's not to say that it's the best OS, but it could have been a business success.
The tiny effect of the UAC being enabled by default has, in my opinion, snowballed to destroy Microsoft's reputation and profits. A one bit difference in the OS will hurt their bottom line for years to come.
I think there's a bit more to it than that. For example they hurt themselves enormously by breaking the driver model. I have a bunch of useless devices sitting all around me right now for which there are no Vista drivers and never will be. For that reason alone I don't recommend Vista to any of my friends because I know they probably have printers, scanners, cameras, who-knows-what that is never going to work again if they install it.
If that's what happens to the company in one of the worst economies in decades, and they have an OS that has been repeatedly panned.... Wow. I wonder what the company is going to do when the economy does well.
> Once you change it to the old-style theme, remove the nag screens, and delete the junk that comes pre-installed on most comps, Vista is actually quite decent.
The background indexing was also a disaster. What an idea. Make my new computer useless for several days so that some searches that I'll never do will be faster.
>Once you change it to the old-style theme, remove the nag screens, and delete the junk that comes pre-installed on most comps, Vista is actually quite decent.
I have to agree... a friend of mine has been using the public beta and, after tinkering with it for a while, I found it to be a very functional, rather natural step for Windows.
By my account, Windows 7 hype is really annoying. They graft on a clone of Kicker and everyone swoons, wtf? There's no reason to believe it'll do any better than Vista that I've seen.
I run the 7 beta now. Its quite usable, faster than vista, and as stable as XP. The extra features work fine but they're just gravy on a decent windows OS.
The difference here is that when I got some new PC's with vista, it was so quirky that we had to bust them all back to XP to get them to be usable. (It should not take 25 minutes to copy 12 meg onto a thumb drive).
If new PC's came with the current windows 7, I'd shrug and say "good enough" and not think about it again. At mircosoft's market share, that's a win.
I'm running Win7 on the low-spec'd 'home' computer that the rest of the family uses - 1.8ghz Sempron, 1GB ram - and it works surprisingly well.
I think it's got the best of Vista and XP and less of the garbage we hate. I think it will be successful if Microsoft can pull off a good marketing campaign. The difference between IT departments upgrading to Vista or upgrading to Windows 7 is that Win7 will actually run fairly well on their old hardware.
7 scales down like Vista never did. I installed the beta on a 4-year-old TabletPC with .5GB RAM, and it runs as well as XP ever did. I'll probably upgrade my dev workstation when the RC is released.
I installed Windows 7 two weeks ago. It's really, really nice.
I did have some stability problems right after the install: One of my two video cards was a PCI graphics card that was over 4 years old, and NVidia isn't making 64bit Win7 drivers for it. So, after a quick trip to Fry's, I updated the most recent NVidia drivers, and I'm golden.
The OS seems beautiful and well thought out. It's nice to see MSFT get a little religion about design. It ships with a lovely command line/scripting language called PowerShell 2. I've been using Powershell 1.0 for a year or two, and I'm really happy with the updates. The integrated Powershell IDE is actually quite nice.
Did I mention that the OS was free? MSFT's Bizspark program for startups lets you have access to almost all MSFT's software library for 3 years at a cost of $100 at the end of the program.
It actually makes me think about doing Windows desktop development using IronPython + .NET. At very least, I'm definitely going a desktop widget for my web app.
Every day, I see more and more parallels between coding and law: the philosophy of each dictates elegant and simple design, but(because) the practitioners spend most of their time navigating hopelessly complex legacy systems.
It never ceases to amaze me how many predictions about the demise of a software product (in this case Windows 7), and it hasn't even been released yet!
Some reviews of Windows 7 have been very positive, some have been negative, but only time will really tell how well it will fare. Microsoft should be looking at ways to avoid the missteps of Vista and its adoption, but to say that IT departments can hold out forever on XP, or to think they will mass adopt Mac or Linux is less likely than the prognosticators will care to admit.
It seems like Windows 7 should do pretty well. The hardware has caught up, whereas Vista was pushing it for crappy business (versus gamer) class hardware.
For MS' sake, it surely can't fail, though like XP before it, the full acceptance may be a year or two coming. I remember when XP was banned from our Schlumberger LANs because it could do its own routing. All that was soon forgotten though.
If Windows 7 fixes the file explorer, I'll be happy. Vista has a bad habit of turning all my folders into "Music" folders, and making it impossible to sort things by date.
I think Windows 7 will be a success, and Vista will be remembered much as Windows ME has been, as a short lived inferior product that nobody wanted.