Close but no cigar Microsoft

The WWW and the blogosphere is alive with positive reviews of Microsoft Windows 7 beta running on everything from smartphones to netbooks. The biggest contributor of this is the failure of Vista. The OS that was summarily dismissed by major OEM's and home consumers alike. In fact, Microsoft extended XP support and use just to make people happy, not something they are accustomed to doing.

This is akin to asking Pontiac if any other car sold better than the ill-fated Aztek.



W7 is almost the service pack that Vista should have been but it is likely a marketing reason since a name change was in order but Microsoft is use to doing this as well, i.e. the Millennium debacle.

They are actually listening to their users and their community by making a light weight OS that can run on a computer that is not spec'd out like a WoW gaming rig. But here's where they fall short, they will still only sell one OS at a time and not support all versions for a seven year life cycle. Can you imagine if Microsoft open sourced their bits and adopted a subscription model like the enterprise Linux distros? No more legal threats and "Dark Side" like mentality towards their customers, just good software where people and companies would gladly pay for support.

And that my friend, is precisely why I work for Red Hat.