Once the world problems, like the economy of (name your country here), and the threat of nuclear war from the glorious leader of North Korea are out of the way, it allows time to settle in on the same problems that were there before the disaster.
First, it was the problems of the government of New Zealand, and their refusal to buy inflated price software in a shrinking market, and next it was the apparent loss of reason by a well-respected Taiwanese manufacturer , thinking that Windows 7 would somehow be better suited to the needs of a low-powered netbook than any Linux derivative.
Of course, to run a ‘netbook’ on Windows 7, it becomes necessary to redefine what a ‘netbook’ is. When you bog it down with Windows, it becomes necessary to pump up the horsepower, yet by so doing, you ruin the wonderful use per charge time that the early netbooks were becoming famous for.
The people down under don’t take to this very well, and a piece in ITWire tells one man’s opinion of this, but it is a shared opinion.
For sometime earlier this year, there was much talk about how Windows 7 was going to play saviour to rescue its creators from the cesspit that Vista had created. Now it looks like even the biggest fans of that company in Redmond have realised that it is another dud.
I guess the disillusionment has begun with the netbook; for a while Windows 7 was going to run on netbooks at speeds that would rival that of XP. But when Microsoft decided that netbooks needed to be redefined – the classic tactic of moving the goalposts when your argument misses its mark – then the scales fell from admiring eyes.
There’s no need to wonder anymore: Windows 7 will be Vista Mark II. The time for illusions is over and the real stuff is being jammed into the innards of this great operating system – to use bizspeak, ” as we speak, 24/7, seamlessly.”
What has passed for a netbook all this time never was. No, the new specs which Microsoft has brought to the table are those of a low-end laptop. You need to pay through the nose for a toy too.
It looks like all the positive press about Windows 7 has emboldened the beast of Redmond to stretch out its claws. Customers are being told bluntly that they will have to pay more from now on – witness the case of the Australian charities and that of New Zealand.
The chickens are being counted well and truly before they are hatched.
They’ve even got Asus onside, to shout loud and clear that Linux has no future on netbooks. What did it take to come up with that kind of talk, that flies in the face of every bit of logic?
With Windows 7, it looks like Microsoft has shot its bolt. The Vista fiasco is going to be repeated. XP will have to be pulled out of the dustbins and retained on desktops as the world waits, in a breathless state, for Windows 8. Or 9. Or maybe 12.
the above writer isn’t too sure about the new search effort, Bing, which John C. Dvorak insists must stand for Bing IS Not Google – note the little programmer’s trick of recursion! (all the brain cells in Redmond are not anesthetized, just yet)
The forthcoming launch of a new search service tells us one thing – the old one was a miserable failure. It’s part of a tale that says much about Microsoft these days. With Ballmer guiding the ship, it looks like things are lurching from one crisis to another. Something like the Titanic on steroids.
The dud Zune has now been relaunched but it will fail too, in the face of the Apple challenge. Saddam Hussein’s tactics don’t work in this kind of war.
The article gets a bit bitter from there, but he point is, this is how Microsoft is making people across the globe feel. This is not going to translate into massive sales, and public support of a company that needs all the public support it can get.
I find it very hard to take all the zeal with which the big publications here in these United States speak about the unending greatness of Windows 7; I have used the (ostensibly) same beta and now Release Candidate that they have, and though I see touches where I can say there have been improvements, there have been losses as well. This seems to be the same view taken by publications in other countries that I see (where there is an English or French translation).
One last thing, from the article, and drowned out in the US periodicals by fanboy behavior –
A search for “Windows 7 a dud” brings up a fair number of hits. Google has spoken, friends, and as we know Google is never wrong.
I wonder what Bing would come up with on that search.
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