How Vista Mistakes Changed Windows 7 Development

snydeq writes "For the past several months, Microsoft has engaged in an extended public mea culpa about Vista, holding a series of press interviews to explain how the company's Vista mistakes changed the development process of Windows 7. Chief among these changes was the determination to 'define a feature set early on' and only share that feature set with partners and customers when the company is confident they will be incorporated into the final OS. And to solve PC-compatibility issues, Microsoft has said all versions of Windows 7 will run even on low-cost netbooks. Moreover, Microsoft reiterated that the beta of Windows 7 that is now available is already feature-complete, although its final release to business customers isn't expected until November." As a data point for how well this has all worked out in practice, reader The other A.N.Other recommends a ZDNet article describing rough benchmarks for three versions of Windows 7 against Vista and XP. In particular, Win-7 build 7048 (64-bit) vs. Win-7 build 7000 (32-bit and 64-bit) vs. Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3 were tested on both high-end and low-end hardware. The conclusions: Windows 7 is, overall, faster than both Vista and XP. As Windows 7 progresses, it's getting faster (or at least the 64-bit editions are). On a higher-spec system, 64-bit is best. On a lower-spec system, 32-bit is best.

Comments

Re:release date

[girlintraining]

I don't think I am. I'm considering the total level of satisfaction with a Windows 7-based system,

What the frack does total level of satisfaction have to do with the price of tea in China?

Hey. My ford pinto has four cup holders, compared to your Ferrari which only has two. And my pinto is purple while your Ferrari is a boring grey. Clearly the Pinto is a better product based on "total level of satisfaction". -_- Seriously...

*Nix + ARM = Death of Wintel platform

[DomainDominator]

MSFT and Intel are REALLY scared right now.

Ooops.. IE8.

[Dynamoo]

So Windows 7 looks better than Vista. Fair enough. The problem is that Windows 7 comes bundled with IE8 which is a piece of garbage. Corporate users will want Win 7 (well, they will do when they can't get XP), but they won't want IE8 because so many web sites don't work properly with it, and it will break corporate apps. (If the beta is anything like the production version).

Don't underestimate Microsoft's capacity to screw this up completely.