Windows 7

 Steven Sinofsky gave a very upbeat introduction to Windows 7. Windows 7 of course is the version of Windows that comes after Vista, and Vista of course is one of Microsoft's biggest business embarrassments. Vista isn't at all a bad system today, what with the platform hardware catching up and with the SP1 fixes. In retrospect, Vista was just much too much stuff, all pulling in different directions. Remember that Vista was the version of Windows that (1) converged the client source tree with the Server and changed device models; (2) introduced a whole new application model (Dot Net); (3) introduced a new UI model that leveraged GPU hardware; (4) was reengineered to provide much better security; and so on. Possibly it was just too much, but certainly it was too much for Microsoft to wrangle successfully into something that was ready for the marketplace and that the marketplace was in turn ready for. When you talk to insiders, there was no shortage of contributing problems. But the causality of the Vista debacle isn't really the issue; the issue is the brand damage that occurred. Windows 7 is an entirely different beast. With the possible exception of multi-touch integration (which is very much optional), it isn't really a different or new operating system -- rather it's a much refined and better system in a lot of little ways. Julie Larson Green, who drove the UI improvements in Office 2007, has been hard at work with Windows 7 with similar results -- significantly better usability and a more pleasing user experience. And Windows 7 intends to be smaller and faster as well which will be welcome too. It took a lot of hard work by people like Sinofsky and and Jon DeVann (who we are told gets a lot of credits for herding the many engineering pieces back into a team). The product team seems to be doing a great job building on Vista and remedying the things that went wrong there. At some point soon the marketing team gets the more difficult challenge of reestablishing the brand.