Microsoft Hoping New Windows Operating System is “7th Heaven”
By Jason Facer, Central Illinois Business Magazine contributor
Microsoft’s eagerly anticipated Windows 7 operating system hits shelves on October 22, and the software giant isn’t the only one hoping for a home run. Consumers, fed up with the frequently—and, in reality, often unfairly—maligned Windows Vista software platform, are counting on the Redmond, Wash.-based technology behemoth to restore to Windows 7 the features and aesthetics that made Microsoft’s Windows XP so wildly popular among both consumers and business users.
In what could be interpreted as an admission of guilt from Microsoft, the company’s Windows 7 section of its Web site concedes that “[w]e know you love Windows XP…With Windows 7, we used your feedback to make things even better.” By simplifying some of the most common commands executed within the company’s operating systems, Microsoft hopes to erase memories of the at-times cumbersome and confusing Vista operating system. Furthermore, Microsoft has added a host of new features to Windows 7—most of which can be accessed with just a single click of the mouse—and has streamlined the product as well, a welcome change of pace from the resources-intensive Vista operating system.
Perhaps most stunning is Microsoft’s plan to provide consumers who purchase Windows Vista with a coupon entitling the user to a free upgrade to Windows 7 once the latter has been released in late October. To be sure, Microsoft is extremely confident in the appeal of its newest operating system, and the company is betting heavily that its release will help boost sagging revenues in the operating system sector.
Microsoft’s client division, in fact, posted a first-quarter 2009 decrease in gross revenues of four percent from software sales compared to the same three-month period in 2008. Meanwhile, the software manufacturer’s business and server sectors posted impressive increases of 23 percent and 20 percent, respectively, but all eyes are nevertheless focused on the release of Windows 7 and what the product will mean to Microsoft’s bottom line.
What the release of Windows 7 will mean to area businesses reliant on Microsoft’s operating system platform is what many local decision-makers are most anxious to discover. Historically, the migration to a new operating system does not begin in earnest until at least one year—and often much longer—after the new system has been on the market. (For example, even as Microsoft’s Server 2008 was being released last year, many area businesses were just completing the move to Microsoft’s Server 2003 platform.)
Fortunately, for local businesses wary of transitioning from, say, Windows XP to the new, relatively untested Windows 7, Microsoft has announced that the purchase of a Windows 7 license will entitle the user to downgrade the software to Windows XP for 18 months following the release of Windows 7 on October 22. Thus, while genuine XP licenses may no longer be available, the purchase of Microsoft’s latest operating system will enable business owners to remain on the more comfortable Windows XP platform until third-party software manufacturers—the companies that produce the industry-specific software upon which many local businesses are reliant—retool their products and make them compatible with Windows 7.
