Windows 7 Introduced at PDC

Microsoft was straight to the point during the presentation of Windows 7 at PDC; mostly to the delight of the audience.

Ray Ozzie noted that Windows 7 is going to increase the value of consumers’ investments through the combination of PC, Web and mobile devices. — “If you take one thing away from what you see here today at PDC, it is that we can do our customers a great service by focusing how much we can give them for a combined value of their investments. Our objective to make the combination of PC, phone and the Web of more value than the sum of their parts.”

Julie Larson-Green who is the vice-president for Windows experience demonstrated the touchscreen capabilities of Windows 7 and assured the people that even older applications do not need code-rewrite to make it touchscreen enabled. Actually, a touchscreen functions like a mouse and the only difference is that touch-screen centric applications tend to have larger buttons like a Point of Sales system. No points here for Microsoft.

Anyways, Julie went on to show Device Stage service which allow various devices like PCs, laptops, printers, storage, phones show up in Windows 7 just like a hard disk partition. I would really love to have that effortless functionality in my Windows as I find it a pain to connect all my devices and download my files even if it only takes 20 seconds and a few mouse clicks to accomplish it.

Other features were also demoed like the ability to move the sidebar widgets, combination of quick launch and taskbar; but none were as big as the User Access Control feature especially when Sinofsky admitted that the UAC of Windows Vista went too far even if they meant well on the feature.

In Windows 7, the UAC would be controlled via a slider that has the following options — “Never notify me”, “Only notify me when programs try to make changes”, “Always notify” and “Notify and wait for my approval.”

Sinofsky made it clear that Windows 7 codebase is Windows Vista and since Vista is already two years old, driver support would no longer be an issue.

Another important issue that Microsoft addressed is the memory requirements of Windows 7.
Steven demoed a netbook of 1GB or RAM with Windows 7 and showed that it still has 50% of the resources. By the time that Windows 7 is released, netbooks would be more powerful and Windows 7 can be run with ease; unless they pack it with more bloat features.

Windows 7 is going to be an exciting product and I believe it would smash sales records of Windows Vista.