Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer characterized Windows 7 as an improved version of Windows Vista this week, prompting the question of why consumers and businesses should adopt Microsoft's current operating system.
Speaking to a Gartner-sponsored conference in Florida on Thursday, Ballmer was asked what would make consumers and businesses buy Vista. The interview, held between Ballmer and Gartner analysts Neal MacDonald and David Smith, was published on the Gartner Web site.
Specifically, Ballmer was asked how Microsoft would sell users on an updated release without in some way breaking from current Vista operating system.
Ballmer responded that Windows 7 was more than just a minor release.
"It's a lot more work than minor release," Ballmer said. "It turns out you can do a lot more than a minor release in what essentially is a 2.5-year period of time. There's no reason to just do a, quote, a minor release, in 2.5 years.
"It's a release that I think will do a lot what people will want to do on performance, cleanup in very nice ways on the UI," Ballmer added. "We're going to pioneer some of things in the way touch and multitouch is used in the user interface. We've improved what people call the shell the basic tools users have to manage programs and applications…It's a real release."
Ballmer acknowledged that the company had made some breaks with compatibility to implement new security features with Windows Vista, that were "not without some controversy". "I think we made a wise call, but I realize it was a call that was not painless for the customers," Ballmer said.
According to Gartner, just 10 percent of enterprises have adopted Vista; Ballmer, however, said that 180 million users use the operating system. Moreover, he claimed that the adoption rate of Vista is higher, or faster, than the adoption rate of Windows XP after the first two years of its life. Moreover, there is a higher rate of adoption both in the enterprise and in consumer desktops, he claimed.
Ballmer seemed to acknowledge that Windows 7 was just an improved version of Vista.
"I would characterize it as: windows Vista, a lot better," he said, "Windows Vista is good, Windows 7 is Windows Vista with cleanup in user interface, improvements in performance. I'm not going to encourage anyone to wait; I'd go ahead and deploy Windows Vista today. I certainly run it, we run it everywhere at Microsoft. But we didn't have to go in an incompatible direction in order to make big strides forward in terms of cleanness of user interface, quality of user experience, performance."
But when MacDonald noted that Ballmer's answer seemed to imply that Windows 7 was simply "Vista R2," Ballmer cut in. "When you say R2, you're saying a few bugs got fixed. That's not what we're talking about. That's [Service Pack 1]," Ballmer said.
Beyond Windows 7, "the most important thing we'll have to do beyond Windows 7 is redesign our applications and operating system to take advantage of the new processors from Intel and AMD," Ballmer said.
Microsoft is scheduled to hand out early Windows 7 code at its Professional Developers Conference on Oct. 27, followed by the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in November.
Source:- Ballmer: Windows 7 Is Vista, But Better - News and Analysis by PC Magazine
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