Microsoft Windows 7: The best Windows operating system yet
Microsoft is hoping to win over consumers with its sleek, slick new operating system, WIndows 7
A computer store employee stacks copies of Microsoft's new operating system 'Windows 7' ahead of its official midnight launch on Thursday. Photo: Getty Images
Related Articles
PC World opened the doors to its flagship London store at midnight for customers wishing to be first to get their hands on Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7.
Nobody came dressed as a wizard, but there was truly something of the Harry Potter about this release of a piece of software. Excellent reviews have generated a steady buzz around the launch.
Microsoft, too, is hoping for some magic from Windows 7. The company that powers an estimated 90pc of the world’s computers knows that it needs a return to form after the poor performance and sales of 7’s predecessor, Windows Vista.
Having licked its wounds clean, the company has launched its latest product with relatively little fanfare. Test versions have been freely available for nearly a year.
Feedback has been broadly positive and Microsoft has worked hard to be open and conciliatory with users who might otherwise have become critics – in the web age, few threats are greater than that of antagonistic bloggers, nicknamed “badvocates”.
Even so, for at least the previous three incarnations of the planet’s most popular operating system, it has been suggested that Microsoft’s virtual monopoly is poised to unravel.
Indeed, IBM was trumpeting OS/2 as far back as 1987; Apple has long presented a viable alternative to Windows; and now open-source, Linux-based operating systems, with the backing of the mighty Google, are trying to park their tanks on Microsoft’s lawn.
Realistically, none has a chance of making a significant impact in the near future. Corporate IT departments worldwide are built on Microsoft products, all of them running Windows, and there are few creatures as intractably conservative as an IT manager.
Yet for all that in-built advantage, Windows 7 is crucial to Microsoft, not because of threats to the company’s market share but because the ageing, still popular Windows XP can’t do many of the tasks required of modern computers – easy file-sharing, touchscreens, quick start-up and multi-media uses are all considerably beyond its reach.
Windows Vista can do a lot more, but barely a third of Microsoft users have upgraded to that much-maligned system.
If Windows 7 is to achieve what Microsoft asks of it, the new operating system will have to allow users simply to do the things they want to do, from streaming music to using touchscreens.
Most of those queuing at the tills in PC World were there because they knew their computers should be able to do more – and that is the measure of the mountain Microsoft has to climb.
- Matt Warman
© Telegraph.co.uk
