Singing the Windows 7 post-beta blues

I’ve been spending some quality time with the latest leaked build of Windows 7 (7077), and I have to say that this Release Candidate-candidate looks pretty darn good. Gone are the myriad compatibility issues I struggled with under the PDC and public beta releases. The latest iteration is sleek, works reliably compared to those earlier builds, and is generally as polished as the post-SP1 variants of its immediate predecessor, Windows Vista. In fact, this near-RC-level release is good enough to make me want to dump Vista altogether and move full-time to Windows 7.

But that’s a sentiment seemingly shared by a significant portion of the blogosphere, and it begs this question: Is Windows 7 really that good? Or are we all simply blinded by our own, protracted beta experiences?

[ Can your PC run Windows 7? Find out with InfoWorld’s free Windows Sentinel performance monitoring tool. | See how well Windows 7 beta performs in our benchmark tests. ]

After all, when you’ve spent months testing and evaluating the evolution of such an important component of the global population’s daily digital life, you begin to notice even the minor changes. New icons or color schemes are reported as hard “news,” while bug fixes become cause for mass celebration. Even minor functional changes, like the much ballyhooed UAC slider issue, dominate the headlines for weeks on end.

Could it be the case that we (the blogospheric technorati) have become so caught up in the beta process that we’ve lost sight of just what Windows 7 is (a commercial software product) and how it fits into the larger IT landscape (immediate heir to the Windows XP throne)?

It reminds me of that classic country lyric, “And I just drank until she looked good to me …” (Kudos if you can identify the artist who sang that particular chestnut.)

I pose the question because I remember a similar phenomenon surrounding the Windows Vista beta. For many of us long-suffering testers, who struggled through those truly awful early releases, the Release Candidate and RTM builds of Vista actually seemed quite polished. Some of us even left the process as Vista “fans,” eager to convert our compatriots and proclaim the product’s many “finer points.”

However, in truth we were simply blinded by the elation of having something — anything — that finally worked reliably. It wasn’t until after the general public had reacted to Vista with a kind of collective retching action that we were finally awakened from the beta spell and began to see the OS for what it really was: A bloated ensemble of ill-fitting parts and half-baked ideas that should never have left the build labs.

“All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again … again … again …”

With all due respect to the original Cylon hybrid, I say it’s time to break the cycle. We can start by distancing ourselves (the beta participants) from the actual decision-making process. In fact, IT shops would do well to leave the final evaluation to staffers who have had little or no exposure to the overall beta process (hint: try looking under a rock). Let them come to Windows 7 with a fresh perspective, one undistorted by the anticipation and heartache of life on the beta treadmill. You may be surprised by their reaction.

And as for those personnel who’ve been intimately involved with Windows 7 from the start, treat them as a resource, a kind of fount of knowledge for answering questions about the product and its features/functions. But leave the ultimate “go or no-go” decision to individuals without the extensive emotional and psychological investment that a full-emersion beta experience requires.

Suddenly those survey numbers showing a tepid response to Windows 7 don’t seem quite so shocking.

It’s time for the blogosphere to step off the beta/leak treadmill and take in a deep breath of harsh reality. Windows XP is here to stay.