Intervention: How to salvage Windows 7

I had an interesting conversation this past week with Ben Rudolph, former marketing guru at Parallels and now a member of the Microsoft Windows 7 team. Apparently, my recent pronouncement of death for his new charge struck a nerve. In addition to setting up a flurry of conference calls with his fellow team members, Ben picked my brain a bit about what I felt they needed to do/say to salvage their next generation desktop OS.

Always willing to interject myself into others’ business, I offered the following “pledge” points for Microsoft to ponder:

1. Performance. Pledge that Windows 7 will perform as well as, if not better than, Windows Vista on identical hardware. Show the industry that you can do more than create bloated software. Show us that you can be disciplined when you need to be, that you can write clean, efficient code that doesn’t leave us wondering where all the GHz have gone.

   You’ve already stated that Windows 7 will be based on the Vista core. It shouldn’t be too hard to squeeze a few more optimizations from that battle-hardened NT kernel of yours while also holding the line on the “cycle creep” that doomed 7’s predecessor. Right now, this is Job No. 1 for Microsoft.

2. Compatibility. Pledge that that Windows 7 will deliver a better migration experience than Windows Vista. After performance, the perceived lack of seamless backwards compatibility is the most pressing issue for IT fence sitters. Encouraging companies to bite the bullet now with Vista because Windows 7 won’t help them is not the message you want to be sending.

   Leverage some of that slick new legacy application integration technology you’ve acquired (SoftGrid, Kidaro) to help smooth over the rough spots. There’s really no excuse for providing anything less than flawless Win32, COM/ATL/MFC and down level .Net application support, even with UAC enabled. You have all the tools in your portfolio. Time to put them to use.

3. Usability. Pledge to take all those powerful-yet-buried technologies and bring them to the surface with Windows 7. Start by understanding what’s relevant to IT and then focusing your UI development energies accordingly. For example: Previous Versions, a more robust driver model, and deeply-integrated Windows Search? Relevant to IT. Aero (including Flip 3D), Media Center, and the Windows Sidebar? Not so much. Yet which features got the lion’s share of PR when Vista launched?

   Stop trying to “out-Mac the Mac” on the UI whiz-bang front. Just expose the myriad compelling technologies you already have under the hood and let the IT community be the judge. It’s telling when you see the industry media tripping over themselves to lavish praise on something like “Time Machine” when Windows has been doing the same thing better, and with more data storage flexibility, for years.

Finally, Microsoft needs to communicate better, and by this I don’t mean just under-promising. The “cone of silence” around Windows 7 has to end. The recent, anticlimactic comments regarding Windows 7’s architecture and the subsequent misguided attempts to push Vista at 7’s expense have set off a panic in the IT community. Now it’s time to open up and start explaining why not reinventing the wheel is a good thing and how, without a kernel overhaul, you can still improve (faster, more compatible, easier to use) on the Vista experience.

It’s not too late for Microsoft to salvage Windows 7. As I’ve stated in the past, Moore’s Law is on their side. If they can deliver a richer, more compatible version of Windows Vista, without causing additional code bloat (and maybe wringing some extra throughput out of what’s carried over from Vista), they have a decent chance of winning back some of the IT shops they alienated along the way.