In a post about what to expect or not expect in Windows 7 Arstechnica summarizes a statement by Bill Gates: “Windows 7 will be about performance as Windows Vista was about security.” This got me thinking.
Improving performance at any level will be welcome, but is this really where Windows should be primarily focused? I don’t think so. Here’s why.
To me “Windows 7 should be about mobility as Windows Vista was about security.” Here’s the thing: 64-bit Vista runs exceptionally well on my 8-core Mac Pro with 10GB of memory and a fast drive. Everything about it is a terrific experience. Improving the performance isn’t going to mean much on this machine. However, where I think Vista was not well timed, was in terms of the transition to notebooks. Vista would have been perfectly fine 3 years ago when most people used desktops or even on a workstation today. If people had kept buying desktops, I bet the comments on Vista would have been far fewer. Driver problem? Swap out the hardware. Easy to do on a desktop–not so easy on a notebook. Anyway, yes, improving performance will help things on a notebook, all of which have pretty much capped out in terms of performance. But as we all know, what’s good for performance is not the same thing as what’s good for mobility, or better put, notebooks.
For instance, here are the things a mobile notebook user thinks about: How do you connect to WiMAX or EVDO? What if you move about and WiFi drops yet WiMAX is still there? Is the transition effortless? What if you put your notebook in your backpack and for some ridiculous reason your computer powers back up? Will it melt? Or is there a safe mode it would switch to? How fast can I get the system up and running? Or shutdown? How do I connect and share something with someone else? Is it effortless? How do I keep things synched with other machines? What in the OS is going to help me the most with battery life?
Taking this further, many notebooks come with a built in webcam. That’s fine. But what does Windows offer webcam owners? Nada. There’s Messenger which you can install and I guess you could use Windows Movie Maker. But is this really a pleasing experience all around? You might as well use a Flash app in the browser. (By the way, forget another Microsoft technology here, Silverlight, it’s not going to allow you to connect to your camera either.) Compare this to the Mac OS. The out-of-the-box “camera” experience is much more seamless and pleasant.
I can go on. I think there are lots of notebook scenarios that across the board should be the focus of the next version of Windows. It’s not performance. The needs of users is primarily driven by the affordable hardware that we can use–as it has always been.