Op-Ed: Windows 7: touch screens, gestures, voice, and lots of gossip

Here it comes, the answer to… nobody seems too sure. It’s either the replacement for Vista, or “Vista SP2” depending on which news release you’re reading. For a hypersensitive, hypercritical, market, the “news” is looking pretty neurotic.

What has actually been said by Microsoft is more or less what Bill Gates was talking about last year. The touch screens, gestures, the “feel” effect, are definite. So is the techno-gushing. From Gotta Be Mobile.com, on the subject of Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008):

In Windows 7, innovative touch and gesture support will enable more direct and natural interaction in your applications. This session will highlight the new multi-touch gesture APIs and explain how you can leverage them in your applications.

Here are the other Windows 7 sessions being offered:

Windows 7: Graphics Advances

Windows 7 enables you to advance the graphics capabilities of your applications while carrying forward existing investments in your Win32 codebase, including GDI and GDI+. New enhancements to DirectX let Win32 applications harness the latest innovations in GPUs and LCD displays, including support for scalable, high-performance, 2D and 3D graphics, text, and images. Also learn how to leverage the GPU's parallelism for general-purpose computation such as image processing.

Hm… Win32? Does one glimpse Ye Olde Bells and Whistles being attached to the XP-originated cart horse? If so, and if Microsoft has decided to stop being an employment agency for developers and concentrate on a good reliable working platform, good. (Really, they’ve got Facebook and MySpace to play with now, they won’t starve.) It’s those of us a-ploughing the fields and a-grinding the corn with our PCs who’re looking for some applications of practical thought being given to our problems, excuse pun, who are paying for this. Cloud computing, aka Let The Internet Store Your Data, is another factor in Windows 7. CNET news.com:

On Tuesday, Microsoft revealed a sampling of the sessions, including several cloud services tracks such as "Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service" and "Scalable, Available Storage in the Cloud." That last one sounds like a pitch for a service in which Microsoft offers cloud storage to developers, now doesn't it?

There's also "Live Platform: Building Mesh Applications" and "Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive" on the agenda.

The Windows 7 tracks give a few hints about that product as well. Seven-related panels include "Web services in native code," "Optimizing for energy efficiency and battery life" and "touch computing." The Windows Mobile tracks include "Location, Location, Location" and "Optimizing Web development for devices."

Given the conceptual low cloud over specifics to date, CNET has managed to put all of what is actually known about Windows 7 into the third paragraph. A site which isn’t exactly showering Vista with praise is Vista BLORGE.com, which has contributed to the din of innuendo and rumor this very unambiguous piece, called "Microsoft says upgrade to Vista because Windows 7 is pretty much the same".

Yes you read it right, Microsoft is telling people to upgrade to Vista now instead of waiting for Windows 7 because it would help ‘ease’ their way into Windows 7 down the line. What I want to ask is, easier for who the businesses or Microsoft?

Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer had a few things to say about Windows Vista at the Digital D6 conference recently. Ballmer indicated his feelings that Vista was neither a failure nor a mistake, yet Bill Gates responded there were “lessons” they could learn from this experience of releasing Vista. Which indicates his acknowledgement that there were mistakes they could learn from Vista’s launch.

PC Magazine isn’t terribly impressed with the new Windows 7 and Vista dichotomy, either:

This is testament to how royally screwed up Microsoft's Vista go-to-market plan has become. On the one hand, it insists that Vista is a huge success, with tons of sold licenses and happy customers. On the other, the company recently offered Windows XP Home as a low-cost PC OS. Clearly, there's a disconnect. Now, even more damaging to Vista, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer just used an important tech conference to preview major innovations on Windows 7.

If Windows Vista were a child, it would surely feel hurt, neglected, and stunned by the fact that its parents are favoring its still-unborn sibling, Windows 7.

Faint praise, indeed. So the score is: XP: Trusted, despite SNAFU with SP3 Vista: Well on the way to oblivion. Windows 7: Apparently created by press releases, so far. So, as hell freezes over, we can safely say that something probably might be happening, sometime, somewhere, to something, somewhere. In case we were wondering. Which we weren’t. Suggestions for Microsoft: Find a garage somewhere, tinker happily, until something that works emerges, and market that. Get your market research people out of the Siberian Gulag, and read your forums. Ask not for whom the bell is wearing out its clapper