There’s no doubting that financially, and that’s the only thing that matters really, Windows Vista was a disaster.  Microsoft shareholders must not have been happy.  But let’s examine exactly who, at least what groups, were responsible for this failure and ask the question if history can or will repeat.

Windows is a shell, a large one admittedly, but a shell into which third-party companies plug their code.  I’d like to take each of these parties and reflect on what they did right and wrong.

Microsoft

Okay so clearly Microsoft had to shoulder a lot of the blame for Vista.  They were simply too ambitious with it and when they had to, effectively, dump all the code and start again from scratch half way through the development process everyone knew there was trouble ahead.

Vista was late, nearly two years late and that equates to a big financial penalty.  Companies and major corporations pay millions every year to Microsoft in volume licensing and subscription fees.  For this they expect a regular development cycle, about every three years.  Simply put they didn’t get it.  Thus the pressure was on Microsoft to deliver and clearly they panicked and rushed Vista out the door without proper testing.

Hang on a minute! I hear you cry, the beta programme for Windows Vista lasted a year and a half and took in about half a million testers!!  You compare that to the beta for Windows 7 that only took six months and had only 5,000 testers.

Windows Vista was an experiment, a version 1.0 product.  It was essentially a brand new operating system as Microsoft were trying out new systems.  But there was an awful lot of legacy code built into that and the resulting mish-mash made Vista the dog that it was.

Hardware Manufacturers

The companies responsible for drivers in Windows Vista really have to shoulder a great deal of blame for the failure of the operating system, especially pre-service pack 1.  The driver model for Vista was completed very early in the development process and was complete shortly after the beta started.  Yet it took some, if not most of these companies many months, in some cases many months after Vista launched to release drivers.  I’ve had it reported to me that TomTom still didn’t have stable Vista drivers when the Windows 7 technical beta was well under way!

An operating system will live and die by the code that’s plugged into it, and it died because hardware simply wouldn’t work.  Take HP for example.  I personally can’t stand this company for their driver support policy.  I once had a printer / scanner combo from them that was less than two years old when Vista was released but I couldn’t find a driver anywhere.  Eventually I phoned HP only to be told that there would be NO driver support for this model in Vista because it was obsolete.  OBSOLETE!?  What the hell were these people talking about?  It was less than two years old!  And, frankly, I’ve heard a lot of very similar stories.

Companies didn’t want to have to write new drivers for all of their hardware.  The development and testing process, not to mention the driver-signing they pay Microsoft for, is very expensive and it’s much cheaper to drop the hardware support and force people to buy something new from you.

Software Companies

Software houses also have to shoulder some of the blame for the failure of Vista.  Even at the point shortly after Vista came out when Microsoft were opening up their code left-right-and-centre they still didn’t make their software fully Vista compatible.  The number of stories I’ve heard of, especially security software, and other packages (TomTom again I’m looking at you) that failed to work properly under Vista were enormous.

Microsoft took the blame for the failure of software to work under Vista, the simple fact is that was only half the story because all but the largest software houses didn’t spend the appropriate amount of time fine-tuning their software for Vista.  In order to find software that worked properly you had to go to Adobe or one of the other major players.

So… Will Windows 7 fail?

Fortunately for Microsoft, with so many corporations having skipped Vista completely they can’t afford not to upgrade to Windows 7 and Microsoft is pushing them hard not to wait until the first service pack, the time when they traditionally make the move.

Also the driver support is much better, but not because the hardware companies have got their act together.  This time it’s only because the successful, and stable, new driver model introduced with Vista hasn’t been changed and in the last three years people will have replaced the (sic) ageing hardware that wouldn’t run under Vista.

I think with software compatibility Microsoft made some concessions to developers that may result in some bugs being found in Windows later on.  Yes things are more compatible, but it’s because of what Microsoft have had to do rather than what the software houses themselves should have done.  I’m not saying Windows isn’t to blame for compatibility problems, just that there’s blame on both sides.

With Windows 7 Microsoft are on to an eventual winner.  It’s going to be hard to get people away from XP, especially when you can wander down your local high street today and still see new PCs being sold with it.  So it’s a slog but this time I don’t think the OS will fail, but in the event that Windows 7  does prove to be a failure, at least in financial terms, we should look back at who really is partly to blame.

I was thinking the other day about how I really don’t need to upgrade my PC this year.  It’s now getting on for three years old and, with the exception of a RAM upgrade last Christmas, still has no problems running all my software and starting up swiftly and trouble-free.

Thinking on, PC hardware hasn’t really moved on too much since I built it.  It has a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo and 4Gb of DDR2 1066MHz memory, while the motherboard, an Asus P5K is still on sale, something of a surprise for a motherboard.

What’s more the prices of these components haven’t dropped noticeably since I bought them, and the current high-end parts like quad core processors are still luxury items.

The reason for this is that what I’ve got, and what most people are still buying is perfectly good enough for today’s needs.  What’s more, with Windows 7 running faster than Vista and requiring less demanding hardware, I can’t see this situation changing.

The uses an ‘average’ PC are put to haven’t changed much in the last five years, with the emphasis being placed on the speed of your broadband connection, not the PC itself.

By the time Windows 8 debuts we’ll have six and eight core processors and DDR3 ram will be the order of the day, but to my mind they’ll still be expensive compared to what you need to have a happy computing experience in the home or office.  What I’m using today will still be on sale.

So will hardware development stagnate under Windows 7?  Certainly not.  I expect to see smarter hardware in the future with a great emphasis placed on power consumption.  The introduction of XP Mode and the rise of virtualisation will no doubt only be the beginning of Microsoft pushing manufacturers to include motherboard hardware virtualisation as standard.  Let’s face it, until all new motherboards come with support for hardware virtualisation, we’re all saddled with legacy code, unstable systems and oodles of unwanted patches and updates.

Three years from now you won’t be able to buy the P5K motherboard I’m sure, but the motherboards you will be buying won’t be much different from what I already have inside my PC, they’ll just be smarter.