John Gruber over at Daring Fireball had an excellent post today where he talked about Microsoft, Windows and what he sees as the slow decline of the company and product. For those who don’t recognize the name John is a highly respected blogger in the Apple community as well as the tech community in general and that is why I read his posts faithfully. Anyway in his post today this one section caught my attention and got me thinking
Vista was a disaster for Microsoft. Windows 7 is, supposedly, the light at the end of the tunnel. But the best consensus about Windows 7 is only that it’s not going to be a complete and total clusterfuck like Vista. That it’s something XP users will actually want to upgrade to. Something that, when it comes pre-installed on a new machine, will not prompt questions about how to downgrade to XP.
But no one seems to be arguing that Windows 7 is something that will tempt Mac users to switch, or to tempt even recent Mac converts to switch back. It doesn’t even seem to be in the realm of debate. But if Windows 7 is actually any good, why wouldn’t it tempt at least some segment of Mac users to switch? Windows 95, 98, and XP did.
Microsoft seems to have conceded that the enthusiasts who’ve switched to the Mac in recent years are gone for good. Their apparent goal for Windows 7 was merely to make something better than Windows Vista. If Microsoft were a healthy, functional, competitive company willing and able to honestly assess its own shortcomings — like the Microsoft of the ’90s that conquered the entire industry — their goal would have been to make something not just better than Vista, but better than anything else on the market, including Mac OS X.
I agree with John when he says Windows 7 isn’t really anything that will convert OS X users away but I don’t think that is the point right now.
Microsoft has a much bigger problem that it has to deal with at this point – keeping the users and companies they already have. Yes Vista was more than problematic for them and will probably go down in Microsoft history as another WinME or Microsoft Bob and it is that they need to deal with first not trying to convert Mac users.
What I think will be the progression from this point is that Windows 7 will be a fresh start for Microsoft. It will be the operating system that companies will be less hesitant to upgrade to and it will be one that ease the transition from XP for the average consumer.
Once they have managed to stem the flow away due to the stability that Windows 7 will bring to the table then and only then can Microsoft even consider on trying to encourage old Windows user back. The main objective of Windows 7 is stability and creating the solid foundation on which they can move forward with future versions.
I don’t even expect with Windows 8 (or whatever they end up calling it) that we will see any radical changes other than further improvement on things like touch. What I do expect to see is an even further strengthening of the foundation and quite possibly an increased push for 64bit adoption.
Beyond that point however I could see a real push to advance the Windows platform into some new territories that might at that point try to entice new users from the Mac camp. Unlike John I do think that Microsoft has recognized how badly they have screwed up over the last few years – it might only be internally in the boardroom but Windows 7 is their new roadmap forward.
And it just might be the roadmap that as John suggests could be the one that will let them conquer the market as they did in the 90’s.
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