Friday, January 9, 2009

Windows 7

The announcement of the public release of the Windows 7 beta was a couple days ago and already news articles are calling Windows Vista "much-maligned" with users experiencing "many problems" with it. The push to get the next release of Windows out really comes as no surprise.

The end user acceptance of Vista seems low after two years. I say this based on visitor logs of our websites and also our own user polls during product registrations. XP is still the dominant operating system seen in our website logs at a rate of 75%-78% of all Windows OS visitors. Vista is running about 15%-20% with the other old Windows operating systems down in the noise. This data comes from two sites looking at the last couple months. This represents a small increase in the Vista numbers from what I reported in October and it does show a couple percentage points drop in the XP numbers. These kinds of numbers are probably behind the push to get Windows 7 out -- reminds me of Windows ME.

While I haven't actually got my hands on the Windows 7 beta yet, I do want to try it out soon. I hope it will load into MS Virtual PC 2007 for testing. Hopefully none of our software breaks this time and our code changes will be minimal -- there were so many code changes required for Vista.

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