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Technology & The Economy: Part 2.
By sparky | April 9, 2009
Windows 7. It’s really just around the corner, especially with how time seems to move so much quicker these days. The public ‘Release Candidate’ will be released in May – supposedly.
And at this point in time, there’s a lot of speculation around the ‘hype’ of Windows 7′s ability to perform on older hardware.
Vista suffered from the ‘lets throw more hardware at it‘ syndrome – where you don’t ensure enough backward compatibility, and tried to bring about too much change in one hit.
Funnily enough, many users expect their computer of 5 years to be able to handle the next operating system – not being fully aware of the changes in technology. Which is fair enough – to a point; It’d be nice if users actually read the ‘minimum’ and ‘recommended’ requirements for the program they’re trying to install, and to then follow that thinking, investigate what they have, and then learn a bit along the way.
A lot of people don’t always want to upgrade their system. It’s a comfort thing. They know where their files are. They know how things look, and feel, and where to find elements of the system (control panel, programs, games, etc). Others are willing to throw away a computer that’s two years old (and was top of the line when they bought it) simply because it’s running slow.
What they might find is that they have some virus’s or malware – or just too many programs running, causing the slow down. More RAM and a clean up would help it – but they don’t care. Like many organisations, they just throw money at the problem, and that should fix it.
Right? Wrong.
So, we’re hoping people are going to start appreciating what they have, and maybe take maintainance measures to draw out the life of their computers – Perhaps this is also part of the reason why windows 7 is ‘said’ to be able to work on a:
- 1 Ghz 32-Bit or 64-Bit Processor or higher
- 1 GB of system memory or more
- 16 GB of available disk space
- DVD-R/W Drive
Apart from the ’16 GB’ of disk space, that’s pretty much a standard PC. That’d almost work on my old 900 Mhz Duron – which is 9 years old!
If you have a 40 GB Drive – which many systems come with as a basic setup, especially in corporations- Then that might be starting to get too close. With half your drive spent on the Operating System, you’d be possibly dealing with a bit of a slow system. Possibly.
There are some people (Farseeker, of this site, and more notably – John C Dvorak) who think that the current state of Windows 7 (The beta of which runs quite happily on my EEE 701) is only a facade: That whilst it runs nicely, and efficiently now, the final product will be bogged down with ‘crap-ware’.
And, as John Dvorak happily notes – he feels that the success of Microsoft – indeed, the entire Windows line – is based on whether Windows 7 works – and works well.
I agree – in part – with this opinion. Vista was a bad move by Microsoft. Even they’ve admitted to that. However, whether people like it or not – They still hold the market in most corporate environments. But part of the key to Windows 7 is how it will be priced - especially given the current ‘economic crisis’.
Windows XP, whilst great for its time – is buggy. More and more security holes / flaws are being discovered, and I don’t think that patching the Swiss-cheese like architecture that is XP is going to work forever.
The real ‘key’ to Microsoft’s success with Windows 7 is two fold.
1. Pricing. They need to price it in such a way that it wont be hideously expensive, but still represent a value for money. Both in terms of features and security. Corporations aren’t going to spend $400 per machine to upgrade. Especially in an environment consisting of 500+ desktops and laptops.
And the average Joey Bloggs isn’t going to upgrade his nicely working year old Vista machine – especially if he’s just layed out a pretty sum for it.
2. Upgrade path. At the time of writing, every indication has said that there’s no way of ‘upgrading’ from Windows XP. The architecture is just too different. However, you *could* go from XP – Vista. Hmm.
Win7 is based on Vista – but I wonder how much of the ‘base system’ they actually changed that you can’t go from XP – Win7.
Or is this another ‘push’ to customers to do a clean install? Those of us in the industry know the benefits and ‘psychology’ of a clean install. Things are fresh, and you don’t bring your old garbage to the new house. Microsoft tried the ‘push’ strategy with Vista by forcing people to upgrade their hardware. That went down like the Titanic.
It’ll be interesting to see how much the economy of current times will affect the release and adoption of Windows 7.
Topics: Hardware, Hype, Public Perception, Software, Windows | No Comments »