With Windows 7, Microsoft is trying not to make the same mistakes it did with Windows Vista. That much is clear.

One of the biggest things Microsoft is trying to do different this time is be a more dependable software vendor. The company knows it lost some credibility with businesses by changing its Vista plans midstream and also having several delays.

“We know the stop and start nature of Vista created big challenges for our customers and partners,” Microsoft senior director Gavriella Schuster said in an interview this week.

Microsoft is aiming to get Windows 7, currently in beta, ready to go in time to be included on PCs sold during the 2009 holiday shopping season.

Although Microsoft has been criticized by some enthusiasts worried that their voices weren’t being heard early enough to affect the design of Windows 7, Schuster notes that businesses have had an early say in Windows 7, through efforts such as a desktop advisory council.

“We brought them in periodically at each development milestone including the planning phase,” Schuster said.

As an example of the kinds of changes Microsoft made in response to the business feedback, Schuster points to the way Microsoft handled DVD playback.

With Vista, Microsoft offered the DVD decoding software only in its consumer and Ultimate versions. When some businesses complained that they needed DVD-playing abilities too, Microsoft added that feature to the business versions. However, some businesses said they actually didn’t want workers to be able to play DVD movies on their machines. So in the end, Schuster said, the feature will be there in all the business versions, but companies will be able to elect whether it is on or not based on the image they select.

Another change came when the company showed customers its BitLocker-to-go feature, which brings the file encryption to portable devices like USB flash drivers. Businesses like the feature, Schuster said, but were concerned that the encryption would prevent the devices from being used later with Windows XP and Vista machines. As a result, Schuster said, Microsoft decided to engineer some measure of support in earlier operating systems for BitLocker-to-go. Now, when protected devices are inserted in an XP or Vista machine, users can enter their credentials and then use the device in a read-only manner.

In addition to listening to business customers, Microsoft is also watching how they work. The company says many of the changes that it decided to make in Windows 7 were based on the hard data it collects on how customers are using the product and where they are getting tripped up. (Microsoft has a number of opt-in programs that allow the company to get data on Windows use and problems.)

In some cases, the company found that a little change can make a big difference. By studying Vista, Microsoft learned that often when a program wouldn’t install in Vista, it was because the application’s designers had hard-coded the program to work with only a certain version of the operating system. That’s why Microsoft decided to make Windows 7 officially version 6.1 rather than 7.0.

Source: CNET News – by Ina Fried

Although the enthusiasts that are testing Windows 7 have been generally positive on the product itself, some feel Microsoft has been less than eager to receive constructive criticism.

The issue came to a head last month in regards to changes Microsoft was making to make its controversial user account control feature less annoying. While the company did eventually make some shifts to address security concerns raised by testers, for some, the notions has lingered that Microsoft just isn’t all that interested in user feedback.

For its part, Microsoft is now trying to make a challenging point. It is trying to reassure the hundreds of thousands of people testing Windows 7 that their feedback matters. Engineering Chief Steven Sinofsky wrote a lengthy blog posting on the subject asserting that Microsoft takes in every piece of feedback it gets. At the same time, it is also true that the vast majority of suggested changes won’t make it into the final version.

There are a number of factors at play. First of all, while the loudest chatter right now is coming from hard core techies, Microsoft is also designing for a broader audience that includes tech novices and first-time computer users as well as businesses, whose needs are also different. In some cases, Microsoft is making choices for the many, even though they may irk the few.

Second, although Microsoft is paying attention to all of the e-mailed suggestions, it is also keeping a close eye on what its hard data is showing–it gets reports on what is and isn’t crashing. Many of the things it is most actively working to fix are the kinds of things that are affecting a broad swath of the user base.

Finally it is getting a little late in the game. Microsoft has already pronounced the beta version as feature complete and the bar is quickly raising as to what types of issues would actually merit a design change at this point.

“We are toward the end of the process,” said Mike Angiulo, who leads the Windows PC Ecosystem and Planning team.

But some might say their feedback was never really solicited. After all, it was only last October that Microsoft first offered a test version of Windows 7 to a broad public audience.

Part of the underlying discrepancy, I suspect, is also an expectation gap. While it’s probably true that Microsoft is open to feedback, the level of changes that it is interested in making probably differ from the kind of suggestions many people are interested in offering.

Microsoft does look for broader input, but it tends to solicit that earlier in the process and from a more limited group, such as the 3,600 people that went through Windows 7 usability testing as part of the product planning process.

That’s not to say Microsoft isn’t making any changes between the Windows 7 beta that was released in January and the release candidate version that will be made publicly available at some point in the not-to-distant future. However, the changes may seem minor and relatively few and far between.

One of the tweaks that Microsoft expects to make, for example, is to slightly shrink the size of the icons on the new taskbar to aid enthusiasts that want lots and lots of programs to reside there. For another, Microsoft plans to add a number of keyboard shortcuts that map to various new elements of Windows 7′s graphical user interface. That’s the kind of change that is easy to make, because those that want it can use them while everyone else won’t even know they are there.

Source: CNET News – by Ina Fried

As promised late last month, Microsoft Corp. last week shut off the Windows 7 beta spigot for users looking to test the software.

Microsoft has not said when it will offer an updated build of Windows 7 to the public, although Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president in charge of the Windows engineering group, said late last month that the software will move directly from the current beta version to release candidate status.

In the past, Microsoft has run through multiple public betas of its operating systems before shipping a release candidate, the last step in the testing process.

The company did note that subscribers to the TechNet and Microsoft Developer Network services can continue to access the Windows 7 beta. The beta is set to expire Aug. 1, after which users must upgrade to a newer version or reinstall an earlier Windows release.

Source: Computerworld

Finding myself with some free time on Tuesday, I decided to try and see whether and how Windows 7 would install using Boot Camp on a Mac.

I must say, I get a little sick pleasure turning a Mac into a Windows machine, knowing that it has to make both Microsoft and Apple’s skin crawl to see their progeny used in such a way.

Plus, Macs do tend to make for pretty zippy (if pricey) Windows machines.

With that–and an older demo Mac Mini I hadn’t been using much–I was off to the races. I got a fair bit of help from this site. The operating system installed no problem, although I had a bit of trouble getting the sound to work.

But after trying a couple of things, I was able to use the driver on a Leopard DVD (the Boot Camp program itself wouldn’t run, but was able to use Windows’ File Explorer to get the driver itself from the disk.)

I now have three Windows 7 machines up and running–a Lenovo X300, an older Dell XPS M1210 and, as of Tuesday, the Mac Mini. That’s in addition to my corporate sanctioned IBM ThinkPad running Windows XP. Things are getting a bit crowded in my cube, but I did some cleaning and have also expanded into to another nearby desk.

For today, I am using the Mac Mini as my main machine, including for writing this blog. I’m not the benchmarking type, but it feels plenty zippy doing the basics. I also had the machine run its internal rating system known as the “Windows Experience Index,” which rates a system based on its internal components. Because of it’s slow hard drive, the Mini ranked only a 2.0.

The experience index, introduced with Vista, offers a sort of bare-bones assessment of how fast a computer should be based on its various components. It’s not a real-world test, which would vary based on the number of applications one installs, their network connection, and other factors.

With Vista, Microsoft ranked systems from 1.0 to 5.9. With Windows 7, it upped the highest possible ranking to 7.9 and made some other tweaks to the system.

By way of comparison, the older Dell XPS also scores a 2.0, again based on the hard drive. The Lenovo X300 scored a 3.1, weighed down not by its hard drive (it uses a fast solid-state drive instead) but by its graphics performance.

I plan to keep trying out the different machines, as well as installing different combinations of software to see how things work in various setups.

Now, I like Windows 7. I think it has the potential to be everything Vista should have been.

Vista had a great built-in graphics engine, but didn’t really harness that engine to make working simpler. It had better security, but used it more like a weapon to wield over the user, as opposed to making them invisibly safer. That said, I’m not ready to sign on to this petition, which calls for Microsoft to release the product right now. There are still some issues to work out.

I still have not been able to get the newsroom’s Sprint wireless card working and the video driver on the X300 crashes when I try and record TV and do other tasks at the same time. On that same system, Word 2007 has started crashing, sending me back to WordPad.

As for using a Mac to run Windows 7, there are some pluses and minuses. First of all, it’s not supported–by anyone. Apple approves of Boot Camp for XP and Vista, so if Windows 7 messes up your Mac, I can’t imagine you’ll find much sympathy in Cupertino (though Apple might use your experience in one of its ads).

More likely, though, you may have trouble finding all of the drivers you need. The Mac Mini is kind of the easiest one, with the least number of drivers required. I’ve also read about some problems iMac users have had with blue screens of death under Windows 7, allegedly caused by an Nvidia driver issue. In any case, it’s been enough to keep me from putting Win 7 on my home iMac.

On the plus side, the Windows 7 beta allows you to try Windows for free (legally) on your Mac. For those who don’t want to go the Boot Camp route, either because they are risk averse or because they actually want to use their Mac as a Mac, there are the usual virtualization options–namely VMware and Parallels. I might just try that on the iMac.

Source: CNET News – Posted by Ina Fried