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Windows 7 Is the Next Windows XP

Posted by samzenpus on from the older-is-better dept.

snydeq writes "Windows XP's most beloved factors are also driving business organizations to Windows 7 in the face of Windows 8. 'We love Windows 7: That's the message loud and clear from people this week at the TechMentor Conference held at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash. With Windows XP reaching end of life for support in April 2014, the plan for most organizations is to upgrade — to Windows 7,' indicating 'a repeat of history for what we've seen with Windows releases, the original-cast Star Trek movie pattern where every other version was beloved and the ones in between decidedly not so.'"

29 of 504 comments (clear)

  1. Excellent News! by busyqth · · Score: 5, Funny

    That means there won't be any trouble in waiting out Windows 8 for something better.

    1. Re:Excellent News! by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You probably won't have to wait long, because Microsoft already has a fall back.

      The Windows 7 interface worked acceptably well in early windows 8, even if you had to registry hack it into making an appearance.
      I predict this will be their fall back position when they see sales tanking on everything except tablets.
      They will flip a switch and presto-change-o the start bar will reappear.

      People are not going to be reaching across their keyboards to smudge their screen on anything except tablets.
      Its not going to happen.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    2. Re:Excellent News! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Ah, yes, now there is a shining endorsement:

      'We love Windows 7:

      Somehow they forget to add compared to Windows 8

    3. Re:Excellent News! by JoeMerchant · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Did anybody else feel the "FUD" when XP was announced? It's evil, your software won't run on it, it will have stronger DRM than 98, etc. etc. etc.

      I remember the same thing when Vista was announced, and now 8 is coming and they're playing it up as the big new scary OS.

      I think it's a short-term ploy to drive sales of systems with the old OS "while you can still get it" without a downgrade charge.

    4. Re:Excellent News! by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Windows 8 isn't big and scary. It's just horridly designed.

      The issues with the bootloader are one problem, that might pose a problem for linux, but are actually a relatively small part of what is problem with windows 8, because windows 8 is a badly designed mess.

      A good overview of some of what is wrong with it http://www.pcgamesn.com/article/why-i-m-uninstalling-windows-8

      This isn't a DRM issue, a compatibility issue (although there is some of that), it's not even particularly evil, at least not any more than anything else MS does. It's that it's a nightmare to use because the design is wildly inconsistent for no apparent reason, and it doesn't seem to actually get you anything for that. If you want to use 10 GB of my RAM that's fine if I actually get something out of it, if you're going to change how to shut down the machine, or how apps work etc. it's just unnecessarily confusing.

    5. Re:Excellent News! by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One thing to consider is that for a large company every major upgrade of the user interface causes a lot of costs while people are learning the new features and how to find how to do it when their old familiar features has disappeared. I'm still annoyed by a few things in the new Office UI.

      And the statistics Microsoft has collected saying for example that the Start button could go away - I don't think that they have realized that the statistics they got is skewed since many advanced users and company admins intentionally unticks the checkbox allowing Microsoft to collect data about your usage. That leaves them with statistics from a large number of home users that are more or less computer illiterate.

      So if you look at how a moron works and design your tools after that then you will make tools for morons. But then you are actually a moron yourself.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    6. Re:Excellent News! by Gerzel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, yes.

      The reason large touch screens are not cheaper is because it is a relatively rarely-wanted feature. It just isn't useful in the cases of most desktops and large screen deployments.

    7. Re:Excellent News! by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I honestly don't know if that will help. After all by SP2 they had worked most of the bugs out of Vista but you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet, once the public has made up its mind that is usually it.

      That said after running DP,CP and RP unless you are getting it on a touchscreen tablet or phone I really don't see any real selling points, especially not for business and average consumers. I mean why did XP last so long? Because it worked, by SP2 all the major bugs were out of the way and it did what people wanted which was to boot up and GTFO of the way so they can run their programs, and Win 7 does this even better, with better memory management, jumplists and breadcrumbs make it insanely easy to get back to where you were working the day before, its just a nice OS that works well for businesses and gamers, so why put up with the Metro bullshit? So we can get fingerprints on the new touchscreen we'd have to buy? No thanks.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    8. Re:Excellent News! by Karma's+A+Bitch · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sysadmin here:

      We've migrated about 50 users (salesforce, most are aged 40 to 60) to Win7 from XP about 2 months ago. Here's what's happening for us:

      * No major problems adjusting to Win7 (I've had a couple of quick questions, that's it).
      * Running users as standard users is almost viable (we're having a lot of pain and suffering from all the crapware we have to install (Adobe Flash, Reader, Shockwave; Quicktime, iTunes; Java; etc, etc) -- almost everything on this list wants admin rights to update itself). Users can't install much or tweak much, so much less user-induced OS failure/slowness/malware. We're trialling SCCM for this, so we'll see...
      * Win7 seems less prone to malware infection. I doubt it's anywhere near secure, but it's already doing a lot better than XP. (I'm forced to use Symantec for AV, which is about as much protection as a pincushion condom.)
      * Device drivers for modern PCs on XP is a royal pain; Win7 is ok for now (a couple of bad device drivers for Win7 x64, but much better than XP x64 and good enough for use), and updating device drivers from Windows Update works about half the time.
      * Imaging tools are much nicer.
      * Sleep and hibernate seem to be more reliable. XP would fail to resume 1 in every 200 resumes or so.

      So for us, Win7 is a major step up -- it isn't that it's good so much as it sucks much less than XP (which sucked much less than 98, etc.). Furthermore, ReactOS (last I checked) is far, far, far away from being a viable replacement. MS could sit still for 5 to 10 years and ReactOS would still be far away. Give those guys several more good programmers and the story might be different...

    9. Re:Excellent News! by theshowmecanuck · · Score: 5, Interesting

      And you hit a key point. XP worked and does work. It worked from the beginning. Vista was crippled by know it all GUI designers who choked on their own fumes because they had their heads up their asses too long when designing things like UAC. Anyway, does it work or not? That is the number one point for business. If it works it wins. If you have two competing pieces, say Windows XP and Apple whatever, it doesn't matter how cool one or the other is (according to fans), to business it matters if it works. And once that is settled, the cheaper of the two wins.

      A lot of people like to cut up Windows but the fact is, it does work solidly. And for a competitive price. It can't crash and get fucked up as bad as some say (at least not in offices/businesses, and not in a way that impacts the bottom line too badly), otherwise businesses would get rid of it. No, paying to have someone to blame is not the reason. Having someone to blame doesn't bring money in. Having working equipment does. Having someone you pay who is accountable and who won't get paid again if they don't solve problems does help make money. Getting something for free and not ever being sure something will be fixed doesn't make money. Paying 4 times what you need to pay on the cool product is a loser too. Especially once enough of the cool products sell to be a profitable target for malware makers.

      No, Windows XP isn't really sexy, but it works, and it runs business software like no tomorrow. Windows 7 works even better. And as far as that goes, I thought Window 2K worked pretty damned good too. Now they hired the same hycrapsia victims to design the interface for 8 as they did for Vista. Hey, we can't use some retarded UAC to make people insane, let's dumb it down so we (the GUI designers) might be able to use it; who cares if the rest of the world aren't as stupid as us? Ah, marketing + graphic artist + pop psychology courses makes GUI designer from hell. They need to get interface designers who understand the real world and not just some abstract thing they got from university and inward focused "industry conferences". And as a bonus they should fire the president. The place has done nothing but go downhill since he took over. Ballmer not Oballmer.

      --
      -- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
    10. Re:Excellent News! by ppanon · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you collect statistics, then you need to make sure that the sample you are collecting is representative of the population. Otherwise your statistics are invalid. This is basic statistics (and something to keep in mind for poller "Internet Panels" that try to measure anything to do with the general population rather than the Internet using population).

      If your sample isn't representative of the population then you need to adjust your results by weighing so that your sample statistics correspond closer to those in the population. Now, maybe Microsoft tried to do something like that but, since there isn't any kind of baseline questionaire when you agree to let them get feedback, it would be pretty difficult for them to establish weighing categories for the sample that can be adjusted to match corresponding category proportions in the Windows user population.

      --
      Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
    11. Re:Excellent News! by guruevi · · Score: 5, Informative

      Sysadmin here:

      * No major problems adjusting to Win7 after I set the theme to Windows Classic. Running it with all the bells and whistles confuses people.
      * Running users as standard users is still the same pain in the neck. Running users as administrators and it will still ask you to click through a bunch of crap which pops up EVERYWHERE. However some applications don't request elevated rights but still need it (Java-based programs for instance) and as a result they simply crash with no message whatsoever.
      * Users are still dumb and will click everything. I simply wipe the system if a malware infection occurs but I don't see a big difference in rate.
      * Device drivers for Win7 is a pain in the neck with the signing and the x64/32-bit. I have to hack in certain drivers and some manufacturers still haven't released a driver and XP drivers although they use the same model and similar kernel simply can't be used for some reason.
      * I never had much use of the MS imaging tools
      * Unless you have bog-standard hardware sleep and hibernate still doesn't work reliably and for some reason laptops keep waking up when closed.

      Other issues:
      * Have an external PCIe card? Won't even hot plug. Needs a full reboot.
      * The MS high-res timer drivers are crap on Windows 7 and software can't take exclusive control over them
      * Video card retrace signals are horribly inaccurate and software can't take exclusive control over them
      * Want to set a system with 120Hz or higher refresh rate? We'll also encrypt that signal for you with HDCP even though no content is playing back and screw up your whole custom DVI-D setup
      * Very slow SMB copy (20MBps where it should be 120MBps). Teracopy (3rd party software) solves the issue.
      * Still no native NFS/LDAP/Kerberos support

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    12. Re:Excellent News! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      XP did not 'work' from the beginning. It wasnt until SP2 it was a respectable and stable OS and even then SP3 smoothed it more. XP taught me to image the drive right after main install finishes because drivers could completely bork the install and you'd be back at square one. . There is still a ton of cruft left in my workflow because of how shitty XP was in the beginning.

    13. Re:Excellent News! by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hi! We're conducting a survey today regarding paranoia and alienation! Would you like to take part? The information you provide may be used by various government agencies to shape policies regarding privacy and security.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    14. Re:Excellent News! by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Informative

      Erm... no.

      On windows you actually set the behaviour of the power button (power options under control panel, edit a plan settings, then advanced settings, power button and lid options). By default I believe a 4 second press just hard reboots the computer and that's outside of the OS, but the power button will variously be configured to hibernate, sleep or shut down the machine.

      Now if you're not exceptionally savvy on the difference you may not realize when it has hibernated versus slept or the like, but they aren't the same thing, and that's sort of the point, your 4 options (shut down, sleep, hibernate, restart) should all be in the same place, and you shouldn't need to do a google or bing search to find out how to do so.

    15. Re:Excellent News! by ras · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's not like you have to wait for Microsoft. The already is an an open source shell the emulates the old Windows behaviour.

    16. Re:Excellent News! by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      XP worked and does work. It worked from the beginning.

      Oh boy. No, it didn't. At the release it was just a bloated, slightly more unstable version of Windows 2000. However the biggest problem was the malware explosion, and Service Pack 2 finally got things at a sane level.

    17. Re:Excellent News! by narcc · · Score: 5, Funny

      Monitor is about 3-4 feet away from me.

      You have more than 2 feet???

      He clearly said that his monitor is -1 feet away.

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
    18. Re:Excellent News! by jbolden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That leaves them with statistics from a large number of home users that are more or less computer illiterate.

      Which is the group they are bleeding right now. That's who Windows 8 is aimed at, not losing that group.

      Conversely the "computer literate" are (by numbers) the ones that have the strongest ties to Windows and Windows software. They are the ones who just stay put on Windows 7 for another 5 years or so while Microsoft works through the transition. They are the ones that once Metro apps and Metro hardware become widely available and heavily used switch. They are also the ones who while the most upset about UI changes, are the most able to adapt if they have to.

    19. Re:Excellent News! by jbolden · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Which was one of Microsoft's biggest mistakes. They backed down from the original requirements for Longhorn (which 2g BTW). They cut them again because the OEM's were concerned about a falloff in sales. So they had "Certified for Windows Vista" and "Works with Windows Vista" which was a disaster. Hopefully they don't make the same mistake with 8, though it seems like they are going to.

      If Microsoft just announced that capacitive touchscreen or high end trackpad (min) was required for Windows 8 a lot of the complaints about hardware would go away. By pretending that Windows-8 is going to work well on traditional hardware Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot.

  2. Re:Win8 is just Win7 SP2 by artor3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Win 8 is an improvement over an already excellent Win7 with lots of cool new features. I'm running RTM Enterprise on a Dell E6520 laptop, and it's flawless. 5 minutes of training - some new shortcut keys, and I'm more productive than before.

    I don't suppose those five minutes of training occurred in a conference room in Redmond, by any chance?

  3. No surprise by yvajj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, Windows 8 isn't even out out. It's not surprising that businesses are going to most likely migrate to Windows 7 first. From an administrative perspective, most admins already know how to deal with all the Windows 7 nuances.

    Windows 8 is a bit of a black box right now, especially from an admin perspective. I suspect it'll probably be a couple of years before Windows 8 becomes more mainstream in corporate environments.

    From a personal perspective... I plan on upgrading to 8 as soon as it's out. For $40 bucks (for a 7 - 8 upgrade), I don't see why not. As a developer, it's compelling to easily transition your desktop app to tablet (and vice versa).

  4. Best Windows 8 Review Ever by Proudrooster · · Score: 5, Informative

    Windows 8 - Review http://www.pcgamesn.com/article/why-i-m-uninstalling-windows-8

  5. This has to be intentional by hardgeus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At first, I thought it was just a silly conspiracy theory that they released an intentionally crappy OS every other cycle, but I'm really starting to think they do it on purpose:

    1) Release good OS with an expected lifespan of around 4 years

    2) At 2 years release crappy OS. The people that bought the OS at 1) are not going to upgrade. All of the people purchasing new computers have no choice but to buy crap. While OS sales take a dip, it's not unmanageable.

    3) Release good OS. People from 1) now upgrade, and people from 2) are desperate to get off the turd they bought. Money now pours in.

    4) See 2.

  6. Re:I'd like Win 7 a bit more .. by IvanTheNotSoBad · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why aren't you using the Windows Classic or Windows 7 Basic theme which comes with windows 7? It'll work just like you want.

  7. Re:No kidding. Anyone remember... by Stormwatch · · Score: 5, Informative

    The issue with WinME was this: it would accept both older VxD drivers and newer WDM drivers. Their jerry-rigged solution to make VxD drivers work made the system extremely unstable. But as long as you used only WDM drivers, it was solid.

    --
    Circumcision is child abuse.
  8. Re:Does the OS really matter? by RocketRabbit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You know what's hilarious? The fact that MS Office documents often don't open correctly even between different revisions of MS Office.

    So, you're fucked either way, but in one case, you are fucked for free and in the other it's $499 to get fucked.

  9. Cat Analogy by guttentag · · Score: 5, Funny

    A non-techie recently asked, "If Apple's new operating system is a mountain lion, what's Windows 8?"
    Without thinking, I simply replied, "Dinner."

  10. Re:Win8 is just Win7 SP2 by cpu6502 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The AC's comment was downvoted because he's an obvious Microsoft marketer (or allied company). Especially in his last sentence when he says Win8 is "slick" and he "likes where this is headed" and can't wait to get a Surface Tablet and Windows 8 Phone to "bring it all together".

    Who talks like that? Bring it all together? Bring what together? The last time I heard those vague-type phrases was during a voiceover for a television ad.

    --
    My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"