Will Microsoft ever learn? (Windows 7 buzz)
Microsoft is already working on Windows 7, formerly known as Blackcomb or Vienna, and is scheduled to release early 2010.
I run Windows Vista and OSX, and personally, haven't had any problems with Vista... Given, it might be a little more annoying for the savvy user, but I disabled/removed all those features. I previously blogged about how slow copying files could be (and a workaround).
PCWorld published a silly article about hardware requirements for an OS to be released 2-3 years from now; well, obviously, your current PC is not ready, simple answer. When XP came out, it required a decent PC, so did Vista, and in fact, so did Tiger, Leopard, Ubuntu, or anything else. Companies design OSs to fully utilize potentials of processing power and memory, it would be silly if they didn't.
In summary, if I worked for Microsoft's PR department I would try to keep any articles of a new operating system down in the low. There's a lot of clean-up work to do prior to anyone accepting new releases from M$.
On a positive note, one feature I did find interesting is the realization of tendencies towards virtualization. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V already showed Microsoft's understanding of market trends, and now with Windows 7 support for VHD (Virtual Hard Drives) they extend the power to the user.
http://www.robgonda.com/blog/trackback.cfm?F9F0ADC6-9E89-FD85-7E7A89D88DA544C4
You probably didn't have any problems with Vista but for some reason it was voted the worse software of the year 2007. Add to that the demand of a lot of users buying new laptops to downgrade back to Windows XP. You can also check the number of companies that are switching from Windows to Mac OS or the ones refusing to use the new Vista and prefer to stick to XP till Microsoft decides to release a new OS or till they also switch to Mac OS.
You can write that Microsoft is trying to get back on track especially after it disappointed many advanced users when it promised to release a lot of features/options/services with Vista, especially WinFx and after it tried to regain its role on the internet by buying Yahoo and failed.
Microsoft is losing its empire and will lose it especially when it wants to create its own standards instead of following the international standards. IE 7 was a total failure and it seems that version 8 will be as well.
Ultimately though, this stuff happens every time that Microsoft releases an OS. There's a ton of new features, some of which are good, some of which are bad. I remember a few die-hards that claimed they saw no point in upgrading to Windows 98 when 95 OSR2 already supported USB, and was more stable. Or when Windows XP was released, and people bitched about "Driver Signing" and how Windows was forcing them to buy a new computer, and even if they were going to buy a new computer, they'd just wipe it and put 2000 on it.
Microsoft has to toss stuff up there, and see what sticks. Sometimes, they almost completely miss the target, like with Vista. But even those releases have some really really good stuff (.Net 3.5, WPF, Internet Explorer 7, UAC, Solid Multiprocessor and 64bit support), that are offset by a few really poor ideas, or poorly implemented good ideas (UAC, NetBIOS rebuild, Aero)
Besides, this article was written by the developer of "a truly independent tool that can evaluate a PC", not based on any specs that Microsoft has released, or any real solid information, it seems like it's just based on the general requirements for what the author considers "Acceptable" Vista performance, and then multiplying by 1.5
@Adam, Microsoft has indeed released some neat tools, not sure if WPF and IE7 are on that list... perhaps surface, which will revolutionize the market soon ... Aero was a good idea, piss-poor implementation.
@JesterXL, thanks for bringing that up, not sure what happened. Just fixed the links.
@Matt, agreed that Ubuntu does a good job of downsizing and allowing you to run into less powerful systems. Vista _tried_ to do the same by scoring your system performance, but it still requires a decent base.
I started writing more, but then I decided to turn it into <a href="http://www.greylurk.com/index.php?itemid=25"&... post on my blog.</a>
Oh, and the latest Xubuntu that was released in April 2008 (8.04), works just fine on my 1999 HP Pentium-3 500Mhz 256MB Ram laptop (that I use for traveling and presentations) - I think it would just barely run with Windows XP if I were to try it. I also get a lot of work done on a 2.4Ghz desktop with the previous 7.10 Xubuntu.
Cheers!