Microsoft has launched a new blog page for discussions with customers and partners about the next Windows operating system. "We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion," said Windows 7 development engineers Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky.For a while now, Microsoft has said it would deliver Windows 7 approximately three years after the January 2007 launch of Windows Vista. "The product is tracking very, very well," said Senior Vice President Bill Veghte, who runs Microsoft's Windows business. "And we are looking good relative to our commitment," he told analysts last month.
To prep developers on the new OS, Microsoft will hold two major Windows events. "The Professional Developers Conference on October 27 and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference the following week represent the first venues where we will provide in-depth technical information about Windows 7," DeVaan and Sinofsky said.
Sales of licenses for Windows Vista surpassed the 180 million in the second quarter, according to Colleen Healy, general manager of investor relations at Microsoft. "And Windows Vista had driven client revenue to an average growth rate of 16 percent since it became generally available," she said during a conference call with analysts last month.
However, Vista has come under fire because of its failure to work well with other software applications and hardware. Adoption rates in enterprises have also lagged analysts' expectations.
With the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft will have its first major opportunity to improve industry perceptions about its operating system. "The biggest problem Vista has today is in perception --- a perceived lack of value and perceived instability," said Michael Silver, a research director at Gartner Client Computing.
Microsoft says it plans to listen more closely to what the world has to say about Windows. Earlier this year, Veghte told Microsoft's India-based customers and partners that the feedback they provided was playing an important role in work on Windows 7. The launch of the Windows 7 blog page is another step in that direction.
Improving performance certainly has to be one major Microsoft goal, Silver noted. Another will be to bring a new set of innovative features to market, he said.
"It's hard to come up with 'gee whiz' features for a relatively mature product, but security and improved manageability and ease of deployment -- especially from the standpoint of ecosystem support -- will certainly help improve Microsoft's chances," Silver said.
From the enterprise perspective, Silver thinks the Windows 7 development team will need to focus on making improvements to application control "to enable standard users to be able to install known good apps and prevent administrators from running known bad apps." Additionally, Silver sees room for improvement in in the way that user account control works to improve application compatibility and usability.
Overall, Microsoft will need to ensure that the computing ecosystem is ready to accept and adopt Windows 7 when it finally arrives, Silver said. And the development team must fix operating-system areas that currently confuse users, like the networking center, he said.
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