Is Windows 7 getting a fair chance?
My unequivocal answer to that would be – No!
I’ve already seen a couple of anti-Microsoft people lambast Windows 7 as Vista with minor upgrades, and ‘lipstick on a pig’. We’re not talking about people who’ve installed Windows 7 and run it on their own PCs and really played around with it – these are people who’ve already decided that Windows 7 sucks.
Dec 3rd Update: Doug Holland of Intel (at Intel’s Software Blogs) writes about it too -
In some respects the blogosphere is repeating the same mistakes made during the Windows Vista road to RTM (release to manufacturing). Windows 7 has yet to achieve the beta one milestone and yet many in the blogosphere are writing off this operating system as they did with Vista
Anyways, here are things I think people should keep in mind before dismissing Windows 7 -
- It’s an alpha that you’re looking at. There’ll be lots of improvements.
- Writing a review when you haven’t thoroughly gone through Windows 7 (at the minimum installed it and run it on your PC for a few days) reflects poorly on your review.
- Windows 7 is going to have some cool features – WARP whch lets the CPU do video acceleration; a Touch Screen; the new start/task bar.
- We’re still a way off from the actual release. It might be end 2009, it might be sometime in 2010.
In any case, please don’t go in to a review with your mind made up. Perhaps you proscribe to the Mac Vs PC ads – whatever it is, actually test the software, play around with Windows 7 and then write your honest thoughts. Not what you had decided even before trying out Windows 7 – instead go through the experience of using it and write about your experience and what you actually find.
I’m proposing the ‘two strikes’ test – Every reviewer should state their answers to the following three questions -
- How long have you run Windows 7 on your own PC? If it’s less than 3 full days – strike 1.
- Do you fall into the 90% of people who use Windows (XP or Vista)? If not – strike 2.
- Do you hate Microsoft and want it to die? If yes – strike 3.
2 or more strikes and you shouldn’t be writing a review. 1 strike means you should clearly disclose that you are susceptible to either prejudice or inexperience. For me personally - I’ve used Vista since the Beta. On my main machine, and not a sharing with another OS – Vista all the time. And after the beta I’m going to do the same with Windows 7.
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Filed under: Window 7 Rants
Who are you to decide that people can’t dislike Microsoft or write reviews if they don’t?
You have done exactly what you are demanding others don’t do. You have already decided that you will use Windows 7!
Based on what exactly?
Microsoft is a criminal organisation as far as I am concerned and I will not pay for their products again.
I don’t want a company accessing information from my PC – I bought XP Pro because it kept messing up I wanted to be able to re-install it. Until it said I could no longer do so because I had installed it too many times. Because it was breaking down all the time. Admittedly, I could have fixed it most of the time but why should I? I wanted a ‘fresh’ install on account of the registry faults (and I have no inclination to learn how to fix those problems!!). It was already installed on both my machines but I bought it so that I would have the freedom of being able to re-install it. On the desktop (the laptop was always fine as I never experimented on that) I re-installed about 6-8 times when I was told I could no longer use the install disk! That is criminal! And so is the spying and control freakery.
It is exactly why I don’t have an iPhone but will soon have the G1 from HTC and Google.
On a happier note: millions of people have Microsoft’s criminality to thank for steering them toward a far superior OS. Linux