Well, I read the WIRED article, Seven good reasons to switch to Windows 7, and unfortunately I found it to be pretty thin.Two questions in the opening paragraph really put me off:
"Do I really want to continue using an eight-year-old operating system?" -- Well, that's like asking, "Do I really want to continue living in a eight-year-old house?" If the house fits me, and is comfortable, and has all the things I need, then I'll be perfectly happy to live there for another eight years, thank you very much. Just because something is old doesn't automatically mean it's broken. (Of course, this is an article written in WIRED, so maybe that's the way that crowd thinks.)
"Don't I deserve better?" Uh, well, prove to me that it is better! Sure, maybe I deserve a Mac, or Linux, or whatever. Show me that something is better, and then I'll decide if I deserve it or not.
Then, there were the seven reasons themselves:
You Asked for This
- There's no question that Win7 is better than Vista. That isn't saying much. Microsoft got the biggest black-eye in its history for Vista (well, maybe not including Windows ME), and they hopefully learned an important lesson: People don't shell out hundreds of dollars for a new version of Windows just because it has a NEW NAME. Oh, and don't spit in the eye of your hardware vendors. They don't play well with that kind of attitude either.
Upgrading Won't Screw You Over
- Uh... Some time real soon now, Microsoft will hopefully give you a compatibility tool which will tell you how much money you need to pay to get basically the same functionality as you already have now. And, they will include (if you pay extra for the "Ultimate" versions) a "virtual XP" layer, which will basically inherit all the warts of old XP, so you can still enjoy all those security vulnerabilities while running Win7. (Yea, virtualization is supposed to isolate those things, but you can still attack the virtual XP environment, and how long do you really think it will take before the hackers figure out how to break out of Microsoft's cardboard box?)
Automatically Installed Device Drivers
- Hummm.... Ubuntu has been automatically detecting proprietary drivers and downloading them for years now. Glad that MS has finally figured out how to do this.
Piracy
- OK. This one totally baffles me: Windows 7 is an OS practically made for pirates. Want to display your movies, photos or music on your TV? Bam! Windows Media Player will do that out of the box if you have a Wi-Fi enabled TV, or an Xbox. Huh?? How many people do you know who have a Wi-Fi enabled TV? Um, playing to your XBox? Notice that that is another Microsoft product? How about to your Wii? What's the chance you can play MS streamed content on that? Oh, and even if you have legitimately purchased DRM shackled media, if you don't have DRM equipped hardware, then BAM! Windows will nicely downgrade the quality of your video stream so you can't see it at its full HD level. (That's to keep the pirates from snarfing their movies by intercepting the decrypted data stream as it goes to the display unit.) Just because you can plug into a network and see your pirate friend's shared disk drive, what makes you think you're going to actually be able to play that DRM'ed content??? What universe is this guy living in?
A Better Interface
- OK, so Microsoft moved everything around so you have to learn Windows all over again. Funny -- the interface looks a lot more like a Mac. They've got a 3D desktop. Ooooooooh. Shiny!
More Advanced Hardware Support
- OK, if Microsoft really delivers on their promise (unlike the flop that was known as Vista), then this will be the one real driving point to force people off of XP. XP has shown itself to be surprisingly resilient under the stress of change, but there will come a point when it's just not going to be able to keep up with the pace of hardware and driver change. Multiple cores. 64 bit. Optimizing for solid state drives. Supporting touch screens and multiple platforms (read: smart phones) out of the box. Better behaved device drivers. This is going to be the one thing that finally puts a stake in the heart of XP.
It Looks Sexier
- Well, this is WIRED magazine. 'Nuf said.
So, I'll say I am using Windows 7 (Beta), and I like it, but I don't think I like it enough to run out and pay $300 for a license. (I can buy an entire computer for less than that.) If it comes installed on your new computer, then great! If you have a specific need for it (especially new hardware), or you feel like you understand the interface better than old XP, then go for it. However, I don't think you're going to see a lot of owners of existing computers paying to upgrade, at least until 1012 when Microsoft quits issuing security patches for XP and finally signs XP's death certificate.
There are plenty of ways that Windows 7 is better than Vista, and even some reasons why it is better than XP, but this article didn't do a very good job of convincing me. ;-)
