Windows 7’s milestones to nowhere

The Windows 7 wheels are turning up at Microsoft. Sources close the company say that the latest milestone build – aka M3 – is being distributed internally for testing and that the pre-beta code is remarkably functional and quite stable.

That such an early version of Windows 7 could look so polished comes as no surprise. After all, the product’s underpinnings are still essentially Vista’s underpinnings, with a few tweaks here and there to improve performance/reduce memory footprint. Much heavy lifting was done during the post-XP/pre-Vista years, allowing Microsoft to leave the core mechanisms – device driver integration, kernel and service hardening, the base security model – relatively untouched.

In fact, I’ll predict right here that the transition from Vista to Windows 7 will be one of the smoothest in recent memory – certainly less jarring than Windows 95 to XP, and much easier than XP to Vista. Unfortunately, Microsoft continues to ignore the migration scenario most IT shops are concerned with: XP to Windows 7. To date, the company has said only that Vista users will have it easy, meaning that – outside of a few new compatibility “shims” and other tweaks – they’re doing nothing to address the very real upgrade challenges that derailed Vista in the enterprise.

Perhaps the company is betting on all the new UI glitz that is coming with Windows 7 to sell the OS, features like an Office 2007 Ribbon-centric look/feel for the various bundled applications and Explorer shell. However, if history is any indicator, simply gussying up Vista won’t do the trick (witness the lukewarm reception for Aero). Which is why it’s probably smart that the company is also jettisoning many of the less critical bundled applications (Movie Maker, Mail & Calendar) in favor of a leaner base image.

I, for one, feel the latter move is long overdue. Outside of the well-documented upgrade and compatibility hurdles, much of the resistance to Vista in the enterprise can be traced to IT shops rejecting the OS as overly consumer-focused. Corporate customers don’t care about glitz, and bogging down their desktops with yet another bloated, DRM-laced Swiss Army knife of an OS is a surefire way to alienate them by the boatload.

Hence, the ongoing shedding of features. By stripping out the obvious “fluff” pieces, Microsoft can honestly claim to have listened to its enterprise customers and trimmed the fat from the Windows code base. Plus, they can always fill in the blanks later with lots of Live offerings (many of which already outshine the bundled utilities they’ll be replacing).

Overall, Windows 7 seems to be coming along quite nicely, certainly better than Windows Vista at this same point in its development cycle. All of which makes its inevitable failure the more bittersweet.

That’s right. I still believe that Windows 7 will be a flop. Why? Because of the company’s continued indifference to the legions of XP holdouts. Whether due to pride or stubbornness, Microsoft’s refusal to create a more accessible migration path from XP to Windows 7 is simply inexcusable. In the end, it will be its undoing.