Windows 7 – Prelude
Windows 7 must be the easiest launch among all previous versions of Windows for the techies in Microsoft, while everyone in the marketing department was dripping cold sweat.
Allow me to elaborate.
Vista in marketing terms was a miserable failure.
Vista was released prematurely without proper driver support. Even simple printers, onboard sound cards or webcams didn’t work. Hardware requirements were artificially increased to help new PC sales which made the Vista upgrade very expensive for home users.
Because Vista was rushed, many features which would be visible to end-users were stripped off, the most unfortunate being the Windows (Longhorn) file system. This made Vista only a slightly better-looking XP, without anything more to offer.
On the corporate business side, things were much worse. Poor networking performance left corporate IT departments no choice but continue with XP/Server 2003. Spending a lot of money to upgrade user PC’s to run Vista for lower overall performance wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do.
Shortly, nobody had any compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista.
On top of all these the competition put the final nail in Vista’s coffin. Macs with OS-X stepped in at an unusually reasonable price tag for Apple and combined with Vista’s negative publicity, suddenly they began to sell more.
Vista's name couldn't be saved by making it better with service packs and hotfixes. A replacement was needed.
Interestingly enough, Vista's replacement was nothing else but Vista itself, only in a new package.
Vista was already and partly had become a very good system. It just had to be reverse engineered to drop its artificial marketing load. A reasonable memory usage, faster networking, faster boot times, less annoying UAC and XP compatibility for small businesses. Thanks to Vista, driver support was already in place. Again thanks to the Vista flop, developers had enough time to release betas to public and fix compatibility problems without much pressure from Marketing to launch the product.
In essence, all that techies had to do in addition was to write an improved task bar.
And they all enjoyed the easy and guaranteed success. Whatever they did couldn’t be worse than Vista at its launch anyway.
All Hail Windows 7!