Sinofsky demonstrated Windows 7 on a netbook
We got a chance to ask Steven Sinofsky some netbook questions that have been burning at our souls since we first had a look at Windows 7. For those that don't know, Sinofsky was the longtime Office head before moving over to the Windows group last year.
As a more recent development, Netbooks as a class of hardware didn't really exist during the Windows Vista development cycle. When netbooks do ship with Windows, the resource constraints generally force vendors into the old, wrinkly arms of XP. Sinofsky demonstrated Windows 7 on a netbook during the PDC day-2 keynote, and we were curious to find out more about it. Here's what Sinofsky had to say about the future of Windows on netbooks.
Ars: So what netbook were you showing?
Steven Sinofsky: Let's just say it's "a netbook."
In general, are netbooks something you plan to target in Windows 7?
Oh, of course!
Because that's been sort of the embarassing situation with XP's being extended, extended, extended and one of the drivers is the netbooks that Vista just won't fit on.
Well here's my view of it. So first, I'm not going to get into defining a netbook, let's just say many of these new, low-end PCs are selling with Vista on them. The model I got, that I was running today is available with Vista on it. The one I got all my friends as gifts, because you know, they're like gifts now. I put Vista Ultimate on all of them, I just upgraded Vista to Vista Ultimate.
The key thing that really drove the XP installation where the very first ones of these netbooks tried to have only flash drives. The reality is that, for better or worse, Vista's disk footprint wasn't going to fit on 8GB of flash. And the reason for that is not anything to do with performance, or bloat or anything. We do a lot of really customer focused things, like we have a gigabyte and a half of printer drivers. So you might not want them, but boy they're really useful when you need them.
And when normal laptops have 160GB...
Right, so we erred on the side of consuming disk space with Vista, because there wasn't this super, micro amount, you know, micro amount of format of storage that we could use. So really, what drove the XP desire was to fit on these very small, solid state footprints, because you can go to Tom's Hardware and look up the spec marks for an Atom and compare to a low-end, 1GHz Celeron, and you're not far off. So it's not the processor. I happened to buy this particular one with 512MB of RAM...
The no-name netbook.
You do understand, I like all of them, I don't really want to be seen as championing one particular brand.
We're going to go buy one tomorrow and try it out.
Well, I'm running M3 (the build we got), so go ahead! But I happened to buy it with 512, so I got the straight... well, that was just so they'd ship it to me faster, and then I went over to Fry's. You guys are from the Valley, right?
No, but there's one in Chicago
I guess it would be Dixon's or whatever for you. And I wanted to get another 512MB of RAM, and they don't sell it anymore, they only sell a gig. They sold me a gig, it was $19 with a $10 rebate.
Which you did not send in
Well, because I'll get it in 74 weeks from somewhere in Illinois.
But then I put it in, and Windows has a way of limiting the amount of RAM, you just run msconfig and it will only boot with that much RAM. And so then I'm running it with the build. The other thing is, that with the special edition of Vista we had, was called Vista starter, and really all it was was we took out the printer drivers. We took out the things that consumed a lot of disk space, and took out Aero graphics. But it turns out, the netbooks are all DX9 capable, DirectX 9 capable...
Oh, I'll mark that one off
Yeah, oh that was a question? That's just a hardware question, if you look they're all shipping with the GMA950 or the VIA Chrome 9 or something like that, so it's not something we do.
So yours has glass?
Oh yeah, they all do. Like, on the 915 chipset all the OLPCs kinda had, and what the first round of these had but it's not running so we chose in Starter not to even include it. But the M3 build, we don't have the final SKUs... the product we package, you get all of them in the build (M3 build), as though it was Vista and that's a little... probably the most irritating, confusing thing. So this is Ultimate on mine, and I connected the Media Center on here, I have all my DVDs in a changer, and I played them over my home wireless network, full 480p, you know, DVDs.
You know, to be honest, the real challenge I have with that is that most of that is perfectly OK in Vista too. And what we've done is be very deliberate and specific about it, and plus we'll address the install or print kinda things down the road.
So maybe make it so that the user could make the decision, really, or the OEM could
We just want one system, one "Windows" that will work fine, and then we'll... there are so many more features that we didn't get a chance to talk about, but there are things that if you want to control more of what's installed, it'll be easier. Not as much at setup time, it'll be more post-setup. It's more of an advanced thing, when you're just laying down the disk you don't want to ask 50 questions no one understands. Although if you read our blog, lots of people think that would be really good to have this advanced setup.
No, you don't want that, you want to put the DVD, push the button...
Well we have it down to three clicks. The OEM gets to add up to one or two more, so we'll see what they do with that.
This is more general, and I can guess, but given the small screens, are you doing anything special for the user interface on those?
That's, it turns out to me, the main characteristic of netbooks are not screen inches, but screen pixels. Big difference. And, um, boy, you know, the HP one ships at 1280x768 which is perfectly good. The MSI, Lenovo, a few others are all shipping with the 10.3" panels that are 1024x600...
...such odd resolutions
Well, they're just 16x9 versions of 600x800 and that's a glass thing, it's cheaper to cut the glass in those dimensions. You know, 600 is very tight and I suspect that in the very near term, those are going to get a higher DPI. They'll stay at 10.3, and in fact many of the higher end machines... it's the most expensive part, so the only way to keep the whole thing cheap is to put that screen in. So screens are the most expensive and consume the most power. But if you look at something like the Fujitsu p1610, p1620 series, those are netbook sized, but they have 1280x1024 10" screens, which is also a 4x3 aspect ratio, and that used to be my primary machine, and those are just 1GHz Celerons with 1GB RAM as well.
So it sounds like that as the screens get more dense, and probably before Windows 7 is even out, it solves itself without you even doing much
Well, that a difficult one because basically the Internet itself doesn't work at 1024x768, like I'm sure your site is designed for 1024x768 best case... err, worst case, and so, you know that's one of those things that no one really talks about, and it's not different on Linux, it's not different on the Mac. You know, I actually think the magnifier plays a big role with stuff like that; if you saw the zooming in and out because that makes it readable. In fact, I was in a meeting the other day with that machine, and someone was asking me the cost of something, and I basically mixed up a three and an eight because my eyes just could not tell the difference, and so I went "oh, the magnifier, I'll be doing that this week", and so I was magnifying the spreadsheet.
That pretty much answers all my questions. You know we have this irrational excitement about the netbooks
Windows Growth Slows, are Netbooks to Blame? | Maximum PC
Microsoft is doing a good job 
Ted
