Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"As you may recall, Bill Gates himself mentioned a little ways back that Windows 7 could possibly be arriving as soon as next year, which prompted some quick backtracking on Microsoft's part, but that earlier-than-expected date has now cropped up yet again, this time supposedly in Microsoft's internal calendar. According to InternetNews.com, that calendar pegs the planned release date as June 3rd, 2009, which is a good deal sooner than the "early 2010" date we've been hearing all along, and quite a significant cut into Vista's planned three-year lifespan. What's more, the site also says that Microsoft will take advantage of its Professional Developer's Conference on October 27th to launch the first public beta of Windows 7, although that doesn't quite match up with earlier word that it'd only be revealing some "in-depth technical information" about the OS."

There's not a lot to go on here, but this Internetnews.com article that Engadget has linked to has a fairly logical trail of bread crumbs that leads to the June 2009 launch date. There's a certain amount of logic in Microsoft pushing hard to get Windows 7 out the door faster than they'd originally planned: they get a chance to fix the issues with Windows Vista, they get to re-position the product with new marketing campaigns, and they force Apple to re-shoot all their smart-ass commercials. ;-) I just hope Microsoft is working on a configuration of Windows 7 that's optimized for small and light devices such as UMPCs and netbooks. Vista is just too big and heavy for small devices.

I'm exceedingly disappointed to see the word "Ultimate" in the above screen shots. I really hope Microsoft doesn't repeat the same mistake they made with Windows Vista by having four different versions available at retail. I distinctly remember having rather heated discussions with Microsoft people about how bad it was going to be that they were fragmenting the product line and making it more confusing for users, but those complaints fell on deaf ears. I was cautiously optimistic about Windows Vista Ultimate when I first heard about it, but seeing as how the "Ultimate Extras" turned out to be a huge disappointment, the words "Windows Vista Ultimate" are now synonymous with wasted money.

Don't you just hate it how, over time, hard drives fill up? I'm pretty strict about my data, keeping a tight reign on it (I should sit down with John Dvorak and give him some tips, he needs them). On my workstation and media editing station, I have 150 GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives - very fast, but not especially spacious in comparison to the 500 GB drives that ship in even the most humble desktop PC sold today. Normally this isn't a problem, but this morning my workstation PC report that I only had 11 GB of storage space left. Normally I hover around 30 GB or so of free space, so this was rather surprising. I did a disk cleanup, after deleting everything in the Foldershare Trash folder, and got back up to 16 GB of free space. But where was the rest of it? Read more...

"Last week we showed a video of the Mojave Experiment to a small group of folks here on campus. Today we are excited to share the results with the public. For those new to the Mojave Experiment, it's a focus group effort we initiated a few weeks ago. We interviewed and polled 120 participants in San Francisco, in hopes of better understanding everyday users' perceptions of Windows Vista and seeing whether there really is a gap between perception and reality. We wanted to see how people reacted to Windows Vista when they were not aware they were seeing Windows Vista. We recorded our discussions, and today you can see them for yourself."

The results are in, and they're pretty interesting. Each one of those icons above is a different video, and I've watched the majority of them. My biggest complaint? The audio level is really, really low on many of the videos - I'm having to crank up my speakers to make up what's being said. There are a lot of rumours floating around the Web - it's amazing to me what kinds of ridiculous things that people will believe, such as these people all being actors and this being an elaborate hoax. Time to replace the tin-foil hat with something stronger, like Xanax. These people aren't actors, and the results are legitimate and believable. The general public is ignorant about Windows Vista - that much seems obvious. The people involved in this experiment? 84% of them were Windows XP users, 22% were Apple OS users, 14% were other Windows users (pre-XP...God help them!), and 1% were Linux users.

A 10 minute demo of the cool features of an operating system isn't a fair way to judge the overall success or failure of an operating system, but these videos certainly demonstrate that purely on a features basis, people like what Vista has to offer - and that goes against much of the commonly held "wisdom" that Vista has nothing to offer in terms of feature, that it's just Aero eye-candy and nothing more. Day to day use, program compatibility, installation on custom (white box) hardware - all of these things weigh into the perception of how good an operating system really is.

I'm certainly not saying that Windows Vista is perfect, but the average rating of 8.5 out of 10 seems to be reasonable. I'd probably give Windows Vista an 8 myself, and that's after using it full time since it's release some 18 months ago. What would you rate Vista? Only post a number if you've actually used it for more than 30 days straight.

"After months of searching for ways to defend its oft-maligned Windows operating system, Microsoft may just have found its best weapon: Vista's skeptics. Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista. "Oh wow," said one user, eliciting exactly the exclamation that Microsoft had hoped to garner when it first released the operating system more than 18 months ago. Instead, the operating system got mixed reviews and criticisms for its lack of compatibility and other headaches."

This is nothing short of brilliant. It's often said that perception is reality, and the perception of Windows Vista amongst Joe Consumer tends to be fairly negative - though Joe Consumer would be hard pressed to explain why. I've heard people complain about Vista, but when pressed they admit they have little to no experience with Vista and they "just heard" it wasn't any good. Apple's attack ads are brutally effective at fostering this notion, and Microsoft was naïve to think that the slick, prime-time ads wouldn't have an impact on the general public. I don't pretend to be clever enough to know exactly how Microsoft should have responded, but they needed to do something and they didn't. I'm really looking forward to seeing the video footage from the Mojave experiment - if Microsoft is willing to spend the big bucks to advertise the results on prime-time TV, they could start to reap some significant rewards in terms of consumer perception.

It's also important to note that the demos were done on an HP Pavilion DV2000 notebook with 2 GB of RAM - as in, not a $4000 computer with high-end hardware. The dv2000 is a typical notebook that a consumer would purchase for under $1000 USD - showing that Windows Vista doesn't require massive hardware to run properly.

Are you one of those Windows Vista skeptics?

"If this is going to be the overall message of Microsoft's much-vaunted new $300 million ad campaign, it might be money well spent. According to the folks at LiveSide, the first ads in the new campaign were previewed at Microsoft's employees-only Global Exchange conference last week to rave reviews. As Tim Anderson astutely noted the other day, "Vista is now actually better than its reputation. That's a marketing issue." Microsoft's biggest challenge is to get would-be customers to set aside whatever preconceptions they have and listen to its pitch for Vista. Aligning its most vocal Vista critics with the Flat Earth Society is a clever way to get people's attention."

I don't know about you, but when I talk to people about Windows Vista, in almost every case they have no reason for disliking it or upgrading to it beyond "Well...I heard it sucked!". There's certainly a hardware issue with some people, but I'm often amazed at the craptastic hardware people use to run Windows XP - like the Dell Dimension 2400 with 256 MB of RAM I saw last month. Yikes! The above ad is apparently not a part of the official campaign, but I like the tone of it - pointing out that perceptions aren't always reality.

"A lot of the problems that Vista has today running on notebooks and other mobile computers can be traced back to the hefty hardware requirements Vista needs to run well. There's no point in burying your head in the sand and ignoring this as it's a cold, hard fact and you have to make sure that Windows 7 doesn't require such muscle to run acceptably. Sure, it's cool to be able to claim that Win7 will run on the latest and greatest dedicated graphics and quad-core processors but these don't play a significant role in the mobile PC space, a space that will be huge by the time Win7 ships. It's not just a matter of OEMs wanting to keep costs down, which of course plays a role, but it's realizing that this muscle is just not needed in most notebooks the way consumers use them. Rather than trying to deny that, it makes far more sense to accept it and optimize Win7 to run well with lower spec processors, less RAM, slower hard drives and integrated graphics. This is the real world and that's the world you will be playing in with Win7."

Kendrick's write-up is mobility-focused, and hits on some key points. It's definitely worth the read.

"When we learned Windows Vista would come in three consumer editions, we were surprised: wasn't two enough? New evidence supports the possibility that the birth of the most controversial of these—Windows Vista Home Basic—was rooted in an attempt to sell aging hardware and survive yet another holiday season without a new release of Windows. while this remain just a hypothesis for now, it is clear that Microsoft made compromises to what it considered the minimum specifications for full Vista support in order to accommodate Intel."

An interesting article about Intel pressuring Microsoft to loosen their hardware requirements for Windows Vista, which resulted in a lot of computers running Vista that probably shouldn't have. And then people wonder why Vista is "so slow" on their designed-for-XP hardware...

That's the "White Screen of Wait" (WSOW) - when an application stops responding and you try to interact with it, Windows Vista will fade the application white to indicate that there's a problem with it. I see that more often than I care to admit when using Windows Vista, and I have the gut feeling it happens more often than it did with Windows XP. Thankfully, the rest of Vista remains snappy and responsive, but I wish I could understand why some applications are so prone to WSOWs. Vista has a great tool called the Reliability and Performance Monitor, and it keeps track of how often applications crash (like when I was having a really bad day with Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0), software that you install and un-install, hardware failures, etc. What it doesn't keep track of, however, is how often WSOWs happen. If it did, it would give Microsoft (and us as users) hard metrics about which applications are prone to random lock-ups. I wish WSOWs didn't happen, but so long as they continue happening, we should be able to track them.