Windows 7 Looking Like A Winner (Plus, Installation Screenshots)Windows 7 Looking Like A Winner (Plus, Installation Screenshots)

I just installed the prebeta build of Windows 7 on my ultimate quad-core PC and boy, am I impressed. Sure, when my son took a look at the screen, he said: "That's Vista." But isn't that the point? It looks to me like Microsoft is getting ready to shed its tainted Vista brand and replace it with a lean, mean, good-looking operating system which works. Call it sheer marketing brilliance.OK, so it's still early in the game, and perhaps I'm jumping the gun here, but that's the main impression I was struck by, after the surprisingly easy time I had getting Windows 7 loaded onto my PC. The OS installed in around 35 minutes, with only two or three restarts (notwithstanding the persistent warnings that I should be prepared for numerous reboots.

More important, once Windows 7 was loaded, it prepared itself for its initial launch without a heapload of difficulty. Plus, no problems with the WDDM display drivers, which was a vexing stumbling block to many a Vista install.

As well, Windows 7 takes up less disk space than Vista.

All this stuff leads to the following differential diagnosis, on both the marketing and technical fronts. Marketing-wise, Microsoft has clearly been stung by Apple's "Get a Mac" ads. Particularly biting is the one called "Bean Counter," where the John Hodgman "PC guy" character pushes a huge pile of money onto the "marketing" side of the table, with only a piddling amount on the other side, allocated to "fix Vista." (Then, of course he says, the heck with it, and shunts everything onto the marketing pile.)

Stuff like that must've made Microsoft's marketing people realize that Vista is a tainted brand, notwithstanding the fact that, technically speaking, Vista has indeed overcome many of its problems and is now pretty good.

Clearly, relaunching the brand is the better way to go to build a real adoption groundswell for what'll be a cool, Aero-graphics-based OS with great connectivity to devices (cameras, printers, phones). You might respond that Vista doesn't have any adoption problems, and you'd be almost correct, in that it's doing OK on the consumer front. However, that's in part because it's been force-fed. More important, business adoption of Vista hasn't taken off to the extent Microsoft would like. I'm betting Windows 7, streamlined as it is, will be a no-brainer for business, even given that its hardware requirements are more like Vista than like XP. (Enough time has passed so that the PC upgrade cycle has caught up to those heftier hardware needs.)

So let's get to the second front, which is the technical side of Windows 7. Here, I'm guessing -- judging from the smaller footprint of the OS -- that Microsoft has done a lot of ground-up rewrites of the guts of the code. Incidentally, this gives additional, collateral heft to my supposition that Microsoft didn't want to "fix" Vista, mainly for marketing reasons (that tainted brand, again). Because if they could rewrite most of the OS in time for this pre-beta release at their Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last week, they could've rewritten much of Vista. (Though it wouldn't have been as easy; you don't want an SP4 which chucks out the whole OS, etc.)

Anyway, so the upshot is that I'm convinced, even at this early date, that Windows 7 is gonna be a winner. The only question left is, when will Microsoft launch the thing. The talk has been late 2009. My guess is that the real answer depends on the economy. Taking a page from its favorite talking point of the 1990s, I'm betting that Microsoft will launch Windows 7 when its customers say they're ready -- ready to buy it.

Here are some more pictures of my install, which I've added to my gallery from last week, Windows 7 Revealed: 24 Screen Shots Of Microsoft's Next Operating System.

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