Digital Home Thoughts: Windows 7 Is All About Usability

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends. The first iteration of Microsoft’s next operating system has arrived, and things are looking up for the Windows faithful. In fact, the first beta of Windows 7 is so reliable and responsive that it reminds us of the early Windows XP betas. With less than 12 months to go before launch, Windows 7 is in much better shape than Vista was at the same time, and it feels like a much more usable operating system than even XP did during its beta phase."

The Windows 7 beta has been out for over a week now and MaximumPC has been putting it through its paces. Under the hood, Windows 7 draws a lot from Vista, however, the interface has changed drastically. The taskbar, networking, media playback and even how you interact with windows have been updated. Many of the changes look nice and make sense, such as the taskbar morphing into a task manager/quicklaunch/recent documents controller. However the only downside I see is after having spent 10+ years getting used to the Windows 95 interface legacy, I'm going to be real stubborn about learning a new interface, despite how beneficial it might be. I applaud change, especially ones that help, but I know more than one person who has kept with Office 2003 because they loathe Office 2007's ribbon interface. I strongly suspect that that will be Microsoft's greatest challenge, convincing people that they need to move past Windows XP. Anyone else with me, or should I pull up my pants and tell everyone to get off my lawn?