Did the Netbook Improve Windows 7's Performance?

Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"

Comments

Market forces

[daemonenwind]

Up to this point, people just wanted something flashy that justified expensive, penis-length-contest-winning hardware. And so Microsoft gave people a more and more integrated experience.

As the public finally realized that they mostly just wanted glorified net appliances, demands changed. Microsoft, being relatively nimble as gigantic international companies go, is shipping what people are demanding.

Whether people would have realized this without alternative OSs pulling them along is debatable, of course. But Microsoft is simply tailoring their product to demand.

Careful - you may be asking for another scam..

[cheros]

You *must* know from your XP experience that the desktop appears faster than on W2K, but is simply useless for the first 10 minutes until it's finished hammering the hard disk (and I keep startup services to a minimum, to the point of manually nuking GoogleUpdate every time it gets silently installed). Also, they were the ones to come up with a progress bar that RESTARTED (so, what's the "progress" there) which meant you no longer had an idea whether to just go for coffee or have a full 4 course meal..

I don't want them to come up with more cosmetic scams like that. Your observation about a system needing to be snappy is 100% right, I just wonder where the hell all my computing power goes. Sure, I don't have the fastest box in the world but it's still 3..5x faster than when I was using W2K, yet I have to wait. On a laptop with Vista the system "disappears" for seconds on end (cursor goes away), to then later come back and catch up with my typing, in a boring word processor. That is ridiculous, and that^s why I (a) stuck with XP and (b) use Linux and OSX more and more.

The whole netbooks concept is good: do more with less. After that housecleaning we may want to use what we have then on a box with more power and see it fly at last.

After I learn touch typing. :-)