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Ballmer Sets Loose Windows 7 Public Beta At CES

Posted by timothy on from the conventional-wisdom-ranks-it-high dept.

CWmike writes "The rumors turned out to be true. Microsoft will release a public beta this week of its next desktop operating system, Windows 7, hoping it will address the problems that have made Windows Vista perhaps the least popular OS in its history. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will launch the beta during his speech at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Preston Gralla reviewed Windows 7 beta 1, noting 'Fast and stable, Beta 1 of Windows 7 unveils some intriguing user-interface improvements, including the much-anticipated new task bar.' MSDN and Technet subscribers should be able to get the public data tonight. The general public will have to wait until Friday."

8 of 672 comments (clear)

  1. "Least popular"? What about Windows ME? by Wildfire+Darkstar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...or doesn't it count because no one even tried to take it seriously?

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    1. Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? by Ron_Fitzgerald · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My first thought as well. Millennium was even more horrendous then Vista in my opinion.

      Vista problems, at least in my experience, were due to hardware incompatibilities. Millennium was a terribly built OS that was rushed out way before ready.

      But maybe that was their strategy, "Millennium who?"

      --
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    2. Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? by moderatorrater · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I completely agree. I've used Vista and actually like it better than XP for my laptop, and that's something I never would have said about ME after 98 SE. I think Windows 7 will clear up the PR problems, fix a lot of the things that have bugged people the most, and overall just provide a better experience. From the screenshots I've seen, they sat down and decided on what all the low hanging fruit would be, bundled it into a new OS and are shipping it. These aren't insubstantial changes, but they're things that seem obvious once I've seen them and that seem fairly easy.

      I think that Windows 7 will be a lot like Windows 98 SE was. It'll clear up a lot of the perception issues and also resolve some of the more substantial problems with the OS. I know I sound like a corporate shill for saying this, but I'm actually really excited for this release.

    3. Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? by vux984 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's like if I were discontinuing a model of car because of several huge design problems, but after releasing the replacement model, suddenly started reselling the discontinued model again-- this time, with a spoiler that somehow made it harder to steer. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless it's a half-assed money-grab.

      Windows 2000 was -supposed- to be launched as consumer OS. They even had a "Windows 2000 Home" edition planned in addition to "Professional" and "Server", but it was dropped from the plan fairly early on. The WinNT codebase simply wasn't consumer friendly enough - backwards compatibility with Win95/98 software, games, and piles of consumer hardware etc simply wasn't there.

      So they backed off pushing consumers to Windows 2000 until 2002 with XP Home, and rushed out ME with a focus on multimedia features (that actually largely made it into XP) to have something new and shiny in the home market.

  2. OS or GUI??? by cptdondo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So the bulk of the article gushes all over the taskbar, with a bit of Aero thrown in...

    Are the pundits so brain dead that they don't know the difference between an OS and a UI? A taskbar is not an OS.

    The koolaid must be good.....

    I want to hear what they did with the DRM. I want to hear what they've done to make the system more stable under load. I want to hear that they now have a package manager, instead of DLL hell. I want to hear that drivers now ship with the OS, and I don't have to install 70 MB of bloatware just to "install" a keyboard.

    Oh wait, but look at that icon on the taskbar..... Slurp, slurp, damn that koolaid tastes good.

  3. Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? by Endo13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You'd think so, but it's actually not true. I find it amazing myself, but UAC actually works. I work at a PC phone support center, and we get tons of calls about computers infected with Antivirus 2009/Antivirus Pro/etc. Out of the dozens (if not hundreds) of these calls I've taken over the last few months, I got exactly one call about a Vista machine that was infected. A good 99%+ of those calls we get are for infected XP machines, and I can guarantee you XP does not have 99x the marketshare of Vista, by any measurement. I also had another call where the caller had gotten a popup that would have infected her computer, and she believed the popup and pressed "scan". Only problem for the malware was, the next screen she got was a "continue or cancel" screen from UAC, and that apparently scared her more than the panic popup had, and she clicked cancel.

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  4. Re:Interesting note on the MSDN download.... by kasot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    WMP would render mp3-files unusable if the meta-data is edited. Simply a bug...

  5. I care. I'm surprised to say that I actually do. by Valdrax · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yeah, that's what I thought too. Who gives a flying crap (other than Preston Gralla obviously) about a taskbar?

    I do, actually. It seems at first like a huge rip-off of Mac OS X's dock, and Microsoft is nothing if not consistent about trying to rip-off Apple.

    However, after now having seen some videos of it, I've gone from fear and loathing to interest and appreciation. It looks like MS somehow learned from all the horrible mistakes of Mac OS X's dock and made their new taskbar act like the dock should have. Icons stay in place and don't dance around requiring you to hunt for things. Separation between different apps is easily visible, and the use of color makes it easy to tell what you're hovering over without having to look directly at it. Multiple windows from the same app are grouped together instead of creating clutter. There is clear separation between active apps (in the bar) and the list of apps you'd like to run (in the Start menu).

    It brings tears to my eyes. I've hated Mac OS X's dock from the first day I had to use it. As a Classic Mac OS user, I missed my pop-up folders, my segregated menus, and having all my stuff stay in place so that I could click it without looking or even really thinking about it. I bemoaned how with Mac OS X and its "lickable" Aqua interface, Apple was putting flash over functionality when better UI was the whole reason I was a Mac user in the first place.

    This jaded old Mac user who has moved to using the command prompt to do everything out of hatred for the new Finder and dock feels something akin to warmth for an MS product for the first time. *sniff*

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