Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7 452
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica took the time to talk to three members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team to find out how user feedback impacted the latest version of Windows. There's some market speak you'll have to wade through, but overall it gives a solid picture regarding the development of a Windows release."
Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
However, minus the new taskbar (which I think is a massive step forward), there really isn't that much that's new. A little bit faster, a little bit less buggy.
In the end, 7 is Mojave Experiment 2.0. Microsoft tried an ad campaign, it failed because people wouldn't get over how "bad Vista is". Microsoft gives it new clothes and a new name- now it's the best version of Windows EVER!
In short, Microsoft went back to marketing after the Vista launch floundered and destroyed its reputation (due to a bunch of underpowered computers with poorly written drivers giving the OS a bad reputation).
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Interesting)
What's your point? That mojave marketing stunt didn't address Vista's actual problems.
Yes I've used it. I found it hideous for all the usual reasons, plus some of my own.
My brief use of windows 7 RC just confirms that Microsoft are taking windows down a path that I don't wish to follow any more.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:1, Interesting)
For security, and for forcing developers to have GOOD coding practices, I thought UAC was a good idea. So many Windows devs coded lazily, writing apps that shouldn't have required admin access, but did.
All Microsoft did in 7 is reduce the security, since many users will blindly click through whatever is shown anyways, and power users turn it off.
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well not really. The sudden concern for netbook users was caused by the possibility that people might switch to linux. When the original linux powered Asus EEE PC was released, it was so popular, it pushed Microsoft into third place behind Apple and Xandros for OS shipments that month. I imagine that would give monkey-boy a bit of a fright.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
It's even harder to know the requirements when Microsoft has been publically publishing them as a part of the security guidelines required to get Windows Logo certified since 1993.
UAC doesn't enforce or work around anything new, at all. These requirements have always been known. They've always been considered standard security guidelines on UNIX-based systems and have been the standard security guidelines on Windows since the Windows NT 3.1 release, the first release of a Windows kernel capable of enforcing any such restrictions.
Standard user accounts in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7 have always enforced these rules, and because of such this software often simply failed. The answer from the companies that made this crappy software, including such companies as Adobe and Intuit, have always just replied to run as Administrator, often just because the program expects to be able to write files to the same directory as the program binary. Writing to /usr/bin is obviously a no-no in UNIX just as writing to %ProgramFiles% is clearly a no-no in Windows, but apparently a huge amount of software assumes that it can be done and it seems easier to just tell the impatient user to strip all semblance of security than it is to fix the application.
To claim that this can't be the application developers' fault is just stupid. If you found an application on Linux that "required" root privileges just because it violated the published and standard security guidelines for UNIX-based systems you would definitely blame the application developer. If that application developer ran as "root" while developing that application you would also admonish them. When people elect to ignore the guidelines and the safe practices in the name of convenience they get exactly what they deserve.
In my opinion MS should have just dropped the hammer, not permitted users to log in as Administrator, even from the console, and allowed all of these applications to fail. However, from the perspective of the user, including those on Slashdot, that would appear to be the fault of Microsoft. The answer is UAC. Apart from jailing the Admin account under the guise of a standard user and providing sudo functionality from non-Admin accounts (including prompting for the password, a better way to set up a Vista/2008/7 system), UAC also goes out of it's way to help poorly written applications silently succeed by handling common poor practices. For example, when that app attempts to write to %ProgramFiles% instead the file is written under the user profile. It might not be your favorite flavor of cake, and the icing is a bit granulated, but you get to have it and eat it too.
Re:I can see it now (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll partially agree. You seem to indicate that Windows 7 is pretty much just a continuation of Vista. Truthfully, I can't disagree there. I've ran Vista on my laptop since launch date, and ran it for about 6 months on my desktop (I switched to 7 RC when it was released on MS's website for preview). Overall, after a bit of shakedown time, some driver updates, etc, Vista isn't THAT bad. Don't get me wrong, it shares the same issues and gotchas as Microsoft OS's always have, but overall, compared to other versions of Windows, I just didn't see what the fuss was about.
Windows 7 - truthfully, is about the same. It's little tweaks and there. Still behaves much like Vista. Still behaves like Windows. Take that as good or bad, but it's still Windows, and as someone still using both (and still using XP here at work), I think the most important new feature for Windows 7 as far as Microsoft is concerned is that it's something new that isn't named Vista.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista wasn't terrible to begin with.
Vista was terrible to begin with when it just got released. I ran it for 2 months, hoping for something to improve - some magic hotfix pushed through Windows Update, or better drivers, or whatever. I'm a patient guy, which is why it took 2 months to realize that I can forget about it till the service pack.
Vista SP1 now, that was usable. And, of course, 7 is built on everything that was in Vista SP2, and then there are some quite real tweaks perf-wise, and new taskbar is neat...
I have one other theory about why 7 is so much better received than Vista: part of it is the visual design.
If you recall, Vista had that weird color theme with yellow-green background and dark, almost solid black window frames and taskbar (and window frames were entirely black when maximized - and most windows are maximized when working). There also were those dark yet glossy green-cyan toolbars in Explorer that somehow made me think of uranium glass. The overall effect was fairly eye-straining and kinda "meh". It killed all the bling that Aero was supposed to bring on the spot.
Enter 7: bright blue wallpaper with a bright, highly saturated colored Windows logo in the middle. Almost transparent window chrome and taskbar with a light blue tint. Very pale blue selection highlight in menus, and toolbars are almost white. The entire design has a very "lightened" feeling about it because of the color choice.
I strongly suspect that, especially when seeing 7 right after Vista, there's a strong subconscious impulse to differentiate the two just because of the design difference, and not in Vista's favor.
Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than (Score:5, Interesting)
However:
3.1 required 2 MB, ran OK on 4
XP required 128 MB and ran OK on 256. That is 64 times what 3.1 needed over 9 years
7 requires 1 GB and runs OK on 2 GB. That is 8 times XP over 8 years
7 doesn't look too bad.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
What did people expect. It's not a new iteration, it's an enhancement. Just because they brand it as a new OS does not make it so.
MS (Steven Sinofsky to be precise) has officially claimed that the kernel version number of 6.1 is only for compatibility reasons, for apps only looking at the major OS version number, and that it otherwise would have been an "NT 7.0". I can't be bothered to find the article now, but some careful Googling on the "Engineering Windows 7" blog would do the trick.
There are full-size cars and compact cars. (Score:3, Interesting)
You're ignoring that computers have more RAM available.
And you're ignoring that computers come in a wider variety of form factors and price ranges than just mid-to-high-end desktops. How comfortably would Windows 7 run on even a one year old netbook with a 900 MHz Celeron, half a GB of RAM, and a 4 GB SSD?
We Listened! And We Won! (Score:3, Interesting)
When the original linux powered Asus EEE PC was released, it was so popular, it pushed Microsoft into third place behind Apple and Xandros for OS shipments that month. I imagine that would give monkey-boy a bit of a fright.
Monkey-boy has the instincts and habits of a winner.*
When the Atom netbook entered the market - typically with a larger screen, better keyboard, and twice the RAM and storage space of the competition - the Linux netbook was drop-kicked into the dumpsters behind your local WalMart.
For the better part of decade in the U.S., WalMart was the lone mass-market retailer to champion OEM Linux. It really, really tried to make a go of it.
____
*-monkey-boy." It's trash talk like this that makes me reluctant to reccomend Slashdot to anyone over the age of consent.
That and irritants like the Borg icon and the stained glass window.
Star Trek: TNG ended its run in 1994.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We Listened! (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, that may well turn out to be a major decision: if OEMs and end users now expect to get their (netbook) operating systems for ~$20, how can Microsoft raise the price to $100?
That is a _major_ price hike for devices that now cost $200-$400 total...
Re:We Listened! (Score:3, Interesting)
Aero look for old Microsoft apps (Score:3, Interesting)
This was something I noticed when Vista came out...
To make application I have written have the Vista Aero look I had to recompile. But I noticed that my old version of Microsoft Excel (2003) has the new look. So there must be some code in in Vista that handles Microsoft projects nicer. Which doesn't seem fair.
Re:We Listened! (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely. Intel looked like they were going to start producing "decent" integrated graphics when, in 2004, they announced the GMA 900. It looked to Microsoft like the world's largest GPU maker would finally have something capable of desktop compositing, so they figured they could finally add this capability to Windows without a huge performance hit.
Then, in 2006 Intel announced the GMA X3000, but couldn't produce drivers to enable the advanced features like Vertex Shaders (this took eighteen months). In the end, the perfrormance sucked, and most OEMs passed-over the capable G965 for the craptacular 915G and 945G. So, in early 2007 Vista launched, and Microsoft was screwed because Intel hadn't delivered acceptable 3D performance in time, and had to put "Vista-Capable" logos on 915G and 945G machines that were still shipping.
The whole Netbook debacle hit Microsoft like a ton of bricks becaused Intel tried to segment the market, and used predatory pricing bundles to prevent OEMs from making netbooks with dual-core Atom or 3rd-party chipsets (e.g. pricing the Atom N270 + 945G chipset less than the Atom CPU itself). This meant that ALL Netbooks were incapable of running Vista, not just the low-end ones, because the only way to make a profitable Netbook was to follow the herd and take the Intel deal.
Now that Intel is finally upping the spec on their new Atom dual-core netbooks (end of this year), and now that Windows 7 has been optimized to the point that it's "usable" even on low-end Netbooks, I think Windows "performance" is poised for a comeback.