As many of you might know I work for a large electronics retailer. While at work on Tuesday I was pleasantly surprised by a Microsoft rep. entering the store and talking about Windows 7. This (from my perspective) was unheard of and the service desk and computer sales associates were very impressed, myself included. The rep. came in told us about some of the key features of Windows 7 and talked to us about ExpertZone a way for retail employees to take a few simple courses and get a free copy of windows 7 before it’s launch.
I could go on about the details but that is not really want I wanted to discuss. What is more that obvious is that Microsoft is becoming aware that the happier you make the people selling your product the better you are in the long run. To better explain this lets take a blast to the past.
During the month’s before the Windows Vista launch I knew very little about Vista. We were given very little training materials and did not even get a computer to demonstrate the product until a week before it’s launch. This made it very difficult to not only explain the features of Vista it made Microsoft out as the bag guy right from the start.
My point is that we did not like it because we knew little about it and in turn would quickly agree with any customer or fellow employee that said the almost famous term “Vista Sucks”.
I do commend Microsoft for taking the time to realize that the people at the bottom of the food chain, the sales associates, can change the outcome of the product and that training is key when releasing something new. I hope Microsoft continues this approach to all it’s future releases. With Windows 7 being the great OS that it is and Microsoft playing their cards right they might just be back in the game of OS wars.
Comments? Questions? I would love to hear them.
What the hell is Snow Leopard? I keep hearing that it’s just a service pack or not worth the $29 dollars and more recently I have been hearing that Microsoft is laughing at it’s imperfections. Hey Microsoft take a quick look at Windows 7 because it is far from perfect.
However this does not answer the question. Is Snow Leopard a big deal for all the Mac fanboys and fangirls or is it just some elaborate scheme to exploit money from the population to gain revenue and profit. Let’s admit Apple has been down some bumpy roads lately. Just look at the app store’s developer relations and you can see just a few potholes at 1 infinite loop.
I see no reason why Snow Leopard could not have been a free upgrade. Some even say the feature enhancements could have been delivered via software updates and the processes simplified by spanning it over a few months. I am sure that some would argue and say “Well the core architecture has changed and thus well worth the twenty-nine dollar upgrade.
Lets get serious! We are still far from perfecting the 64-bit model and even further from utilizing it’s full potential. When would a consumer ever need to allocate 2 exabytes of memory. As I see it this is the only real upgrade to Snow Leopard as most other upgrades were already offered via hacking or cracking Leopard or using 3rd party software.
Overall I see this as a pathetic attempt to either 1) Represent that they are still ahead of Microsoft by releasing an incremental upgrade before the launch of Windows 7. 2) Add long wanted features to a seemingly identical Operating System to gain a fair amount of profit (Five Million Copies * $29.99 = $66 million in revenue). Regardless I am highly disappointed in Snow Leopard and expected more from Apple.
If you are still debating on getting the upgrade. I would hold off until the 3rd party developers make better use of the 64-bit model and unleash the full power of Grand Central Dispatch.
Agree? Disagree? Leave your comments.
Hi there. I thought I might give you a little background on myself before I wrote this blog entry. My name is Cody “Belthesar” Wilson, and I’m one of the lesser known members of the Geekologist team. Typically, I sit in the background and am here to give guidance and direction on the way this site moves forward, either technical or otherwise. You probably won’t see a lot of blog posts from me, but when you do, it’s because, well, I just gotta share something with everyone.
I was raised for the most part in the Windows world (unless you count when I was mucking around in DOS 5 and 6, and my Apple II years, but we won’t bother with those for now.) 4 years ago, I decided I wanted to give Apple a shot and bought a friends Powerbook G4. I was hooked from there, and became a Mac zealot of sorts. I did my fair share of Microsoft bashing while as a Windows user, but it certainly increased when I saw “the light”. So when I tell you that Windows 7, even in its release candidate stage, is the first Microsoft OS I feel not only comfortable, but welcome and enjoy using since I made the switch to OS X, I want you to know exactly what I mean.
Being the Apple fan I am, not only in OS but in hardware, I decided that I would bite the bullet and nuke my XP Boot Camp partition in favor of installing the Windows 7 release candidate (RC). Given that I have a new Unibody Macbook Pro, I thought I’d give the x64 release aside, as I was tired of not being able to address all of the RAM when I was in the Windows side of things. The install process worked without a hitch. After installing the Boot Camp 2.1 drivers for x64 Vista (which also work without any fuss) I had a fully functional Boot Camp compliant Windows 7 install. This meant it was time to play.
My first impression was the new Taskbar system, which now very much so replicates and expands upon OS X’s Dock. You can pin applications to the Taskbar and launch them from there, as well as access any running application from it. Instead of having a text description, the Taskbar now only has the application icon. It’s important to note that since they have done this, they have removed the “Quick Launch” toolbar for the Taskbar. Not a problem as this would have been redundant anyway, and the new system works great. The Taskbar groups windows by application, and hovering over the application’s icon allows you to select which window you want from a labeled preview icon. All in all, a very comfortable and familiar experience, especially coming from being an OS X user. The Taskbar has two other really nice features, one of which is the movement and expansion on the “Show Desktop” button. Formerly located in the Quick Launch toolbar, the “Show Desktop” button now resides on the far right of the Taskbar. Clicking it has the same functionality as before, but hovering over it fades each visible window into an Aero transparent window pane, allowing you to see your desktop as well as the outline of each open window. I found it interesting to find that at one point there was a dialog box that had gotten buried in my persistent clicking about and was able to address it in this manner. Lastly on the Taskbar, the new System Tray is fantastic. You can now not only choose what icons appear in the tray, but how their notification behavior works. Also, instead of expanding the System Tray, it brings up another small window like when hovering over application icons on the Taskbar which allows you to select the other hidden System Tray icons. All in all, easy to use, easy to manage. Many welcome changes from not only Vista, but from XP, and given that many users are still staunchly avoiding Vista like the plague, I have a feeling this new interface will be different, but welcome to the users that have avoided the switch to Microsoft’s current desktop OS.
Secondly, the modifications to the Vista-introduced “User Account Control” system have made a very annoying and ridiculed feature much less of an annoyance while maintaining the security benefit of user-granted process elevation. UAC now has a slider that controls just how in depth it’s requests for attention are. Its default setting seems to be very sufficient by being present, but not unobtrusive. UAC offers a hyper-paranoid setting for users questioning if they have viruses, or just really like knowing whenever any system change is trying to be made, a little more relaxed setting which still brings up a dialog window whenever a system change is being made but does not lock out or dim the screen (also an added feature for older systems and I’m sure netbooks, who have trouble with the DirectX transparency overlay taking a long time to load), and finally an option to disable UAC completely. Not being unfamiliar with having to elevate to perform certain tasks since my experience with UAC, I have left it at its default setting. UAC also learns what tasks you seem to perform on an elevated level and will learn to automatically elevate certain tasks. These tasks still have the “elevated shield badge” on them in the Taskbar, but have a opposing pattern blue and gold shield coloring versus the Windows patterned shield for elevated processes.
The last feature I’m going to talk about in this article is the Theme system. Present since Windows 95’s PLUS! Pack, Windows Themes allow you to style your computer’s interface to your liking. Sorta. They can change your desktop icons, your border colors, your wallpaper, and your sound set. And they still do now. But making and changing themes to suit your style is easier, more intuitive, and more powerful than ever. Desktop backgrounds no longer require a third-party application to be rotated. I use the same folder I do in OS X for my backgrounds in Windows 7. A nicer set of default sound sets are included, so if for some reason Vista’s sounds make you cringe, then there are several other themes you can choose from. The Aero and Taskbar colors can also be modified. All things that you could do before, but now have a way of doing them simpler and easier.
All in all, the Windows 7 experience is something I’m truly excited about. I finally feel that Microsoft has a true contender in the OS market again, and it’s now Apple’s turn to start looking at what Microsoft is doing and learning on how to improve upon it. While I’m not about to say that Windows 7 is fantastic and I’m a switcher, I now have no problem booting into Windows and feeling like I’m using an alien or antiquated operating system. For basic users, it’s newly simplified and streamlined interface will be a breath of fresh air. For power users, those advanced features and organization systems are easily within your grasp.
So alright, Apple. Microsoft has finally stepped up their game, and they have an OS to rival yours. Time to step up the Apple experience once again and keep this rivalry going. Because there’s finally some competition in the desktop OS market again and it’s time to see where innovation takes us next.
Do you have a computer with Windows Vista installed? Does that windows vista system not have the greatest graphics card onboard? Well Windows has finally made a huge improvement to the graphics subsystem to help you out. Microsoft is aiming to help GPU-less folks by allowing a plain old CPU to act as a graphics hardware accelerator. This entire system is designed to run on a processor as little as 800Mhz but a dual-core or higher CPU is recommended. In private benchmark testings using intel integrated graphics and an i7 processor the team was able to get a whopping 7.6 FPS at 800×600. This is about a 1.5 FPS improvement over the integrated graphics alone. Although the WARP (or Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) was designed to help out people without GPU’s to improve the Aero experience, I am really excited to see how this technology evolves, and what it means in terms of a more pleasing experience in Windows 7.
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