Development Of Microsoft Windows Operating Systems - Research Paper Example

Development Of Microsoft Windows Operating Systems Microsoft Corporation has revolutionized the way individuals use personal computers, introducing a family of proprietary operating systems called Microsoft Windows, which made user interface (UI) intuitive, user-friendly, and self-explanatory. Modern versions of Windows that came after MS-DOS run on the Windows NT kernel and now on x 86 and x64 processors. Still, after many years and the rise of additional competition, Microsoft still dominates the worldwide desktop market. Windows XP remains the most widely used operating system in the world, which was followed by Windows Vista. Windows Vista, while hailed as being innovative with respect to architectural changes and new features, left many customers hungry for more. Knowing the potential Microsoft has for producing an excellent operating system, these users motivated Microsoft to quickly get working on a subsequent release, a “younger brother” that would make good on Windows Vista’s obvious shortcomings. Windows 7, this latest edition to the Windows franchise, is currently under development but has been released as a Beta version. When a piece of software is released as a Beta, this means that users can download the application (typically free) so that they can use it, test it, and inform the developer of any potential improvements. If Microsoft adheres to the three-year timeline they set for the software’s development, then the operating system will be released for retail in the second half of 2009, not even two years after the retail release of Windows Vista. That is to be compared with the nearly six years that passed between the releases of Windows Vista and its predecessor. In many ways, this timeframe represents the level of difference between Windows XP and Vista compared to that between Vista and 7. As one blogger notes, “The more I dug into Windows 7, the more I became convinced that I was dealing with an [operating system] that was a slightly tweaked, nearly baked revision of Windows Vista” (Kennedy, Under the Hood, Windows 7 Is Vista's Twin). While one may regard Windows Vista as a revolutionary addition to the Windows family (despite its criticisms and obvious faults), Windows 7 is little more than a rerelease of this innovative piece of software. It is a refinement, most believe, on a well-intentioned but poorly-executed idea. There are more features to Windows 7 that Windows Vista, but remains “under the hood” essentially the same. Nevertheless, the Beta release of Windows 7 has met wide praise from most bloggers and testers of its prerelease version. Their praise says exactly that: 7 is everything that Vista could have been. Windows 7 is successful insofar as it attempts to answer Vista’s critics; but in the process, Windows 7 alienates current Vista users. Many users have reported a desire to simply skip Vista altogether and to simply transition from XP to 7 when it becomes appropriate (Flynn). To understand the development of Windows 7 and its quick release, one needs to understand its context; namely, to understand the criticisms of Windows Vista and Microsoft’s motivation to fix these problems in a completely new operating system. Released in November 2006, Microsoft Vista was met by scathing criticisms by bloggers for issues dealing with performance, product activation, security, and privacy. This led quickly to a public perception of Vista as a failure. With respect to performance, many users found problems with hardware requirements in Vista. Applications, copying, deletion, games, and softwares that all ran considerably fast in XP were found to run much slower with Vista installed. Despite the “Windows Vista Capable” labels on personal computers, many PCs were found to be incapable of running the system. Vista was accused of “software bloat”, referring to the size that Vista takes up on the disk. This “software bloat” of the operating system drained battery life on laptops much more quickly than computers running on XP. Many programs, in addition, did not run at all on Vista. This kept many businesses from moving to Vista as a permanent solution (McMillan and Montalbano). “Several key programs,” according to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, “still aren’t compatible, including patient scheduling software” (Mintz). In response to these criticisms, Microsoft went back to work, reviving an old project named Vienna. This project, officially renamed Windows 7 in 2007, would be, according to Bill Gates, “more user-centric” (Levy). Indeed, the new operating system introduces a series of new features, in addition to removing some. Windows 7 includes a series of new features related to speech, touch, and handwriting technologies. It improves performance in booting up the computer, processing information, and in the kernel. The control panel was given a new layout along with new features for customization, including a ClearType tuner, display color calibration, credential manager, system icons, display, gadgets (to replace the Sidebar introduced in Vista), biometric devices, recovery, troubleshooting, Workspaces Center, and others. The Windows Action Center (formerly the Windows Security Center) integrates both maintenance and security for the computer, simplifying the process of protecting the machine. Windows 7 includes preinstalled versions of Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Media Player 12, hallmarks of the Windows franchise and newly improved to complement the release of the new operating system. Users in Windows 7 are also allowed to disable more Windows components than was previously allowed in other versions. Users can uninstall programs like Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Windows Search, and Windows Gadgets from the same panel. These more substantive software features are complemented by many more options in customizing the appearance of the operating system. But perhaps the most widely lauded feature introduced in the new operating system is the taskbar. Bloggers like Randall C. Kennedy have praised the new taskbar among other UI changes. As he says in his personal assessment, “The Taskbar now behaves the way I’ve always felt it should have behaved from day one” (Kennedy, Windows 7: The good, the bad, and the ugly). As opposed to the taskbar in previous releases, the user does not have to go to different places to start a program and to resume that program. For instance, if a user is using Notepad, that user goes to the same place to resume an instance of Notepad that he went to start the program to begin with, irrespective of whether it is still open. The user, in addition, no longer has to search through different instances of the same program to find the one he wants. Taken in conjunction with Aero’s Flip feature, finding minimized windows is enjoyable for once. The taskbar is no longer filled with names of different programs; rather, it is one large program icon. If more than one instance of a program is open, Windows 7 users encounter a new feature named Aero Peek, a feature similar to one found in Vista but more functional. Instead of simply showing an image of what the hidden instance looks like, the user can click on that instance (which takes all other windows out of view momentarily) to maximize the window. Aero Peek adds one more degree of functionality to an otherwise vastly improved taskbar. Another improvement to the UI, Aero Snap, allows for easier maximizing of windows. Simply by dragging a window to the top, the left, or the right side of the screen, the user can maximize a window. When maximized in 7, windows remain transparent, marking a widely praised visual improvement over Vista’s introduction of the Aero UI. Features removed from 7 that were introduced in Vista include the classic Start Menu UI, InkBall, Windows Sidebar, Windows Calendar, Extras, Windows Mail, and Movie Maker. These features contributed to a large extent to the previously mentioned “software bloat” found in Vista, adding to the size the operating system took up on disks. Indeed, the size of the Windows 7 operating system is considerably less than predecessors. As a result, Beta users have found that Windows 7 boots up and runs at a faster rate than its predecessor, which many users found unusable because of the slowness of loading processes. Additional entertainment features of note in Windows 7 include a “preview” pane in Windows Explorer, which allows users to preview media files (along with text files as well) before actually opening them to a program. Windows 7 also comes bundled with an improved version of Windows Media Center, a gadget for WMC, XPS Essentials Pack, a redesigned calculator, and Windows PowerShell, an extensible command-line program and scripting language by Microsoft. Unfortunately, however, Windows 7 is not without features that some can be critical of. While the taskbar is vastly improved in terms of UI, the same cannot be said for some aspects of Windows Explorer, which are mere holdovers from the XP UI. The details pane, along with the status bar, is redundant and should not have been kept. Another thing Windows 7 did to Windows Explorer was do away with contextualized searches, replacing it with a keyword-based system that “requires you to memorize and/or hunt through various filtering keywords in order to refine your searches” (Kennedy, Windows 7: The good, the bad, and the ugly). Accordingly, the usability of the search bar has been decreased from Vista to 7. Additionally, critics argue that it is time for Microsoft to give up hope of XPS replacing the paradigm PDF format, to make BitLocker a little bit easier, and to improve compatibility for commonly used programs like the Nero media suite (Whittaker). However, despite these claims, criticisms of Windows 7 revolve around very minor issues that do not affect core usage of computers. Consequently, these issues can be addressed by Microsoft (if they indeed need to be addressed) in a windows update at some future point in time. Now that the underlying concepts and features of Windows 7 have been introduced, with a context for its development laid out, it is now time to put the new operating system to the test of comparison with similar products. A market for products is one ideally filled with numerous different options for consumers to choose from, with sellers vying for their attention. The case is no different in the market for operating systems. Although Microsoft’s Windows owns a large portion of the market for such software, pressure from Macintosh and Ubuntu has been mounting. First, however, it may be most instructive to look at the comparison between Windows Vista and Windows 7 before venturing outside of the Windows franchise. In a battery of 23 different tests evaluating the relative performances of 7 and its predecessor, blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes found that compared to XP and Vista, 7’s scores on the test came to a total of 25 (where 61 and 52 were XP’s and Vista’s scores respectively). This means that 7 outperformed both operating systems on all but two tests. As Kingsley-Hughes points out, Windows 7 is still in Beta, meaning that these scores can improve even more. The final release code may very well be faster (and even much faster) than that of the Beta version (Kingsley-Hughes). Certainly, it should not be a surprise that Windows 7 improves upon the speed and features of previous releases. However, travelling outside of the Microsoft sphere in the market for operating system, one might wonder how it compares to other softwares such as those released by Ubuntu (a free system) and Macintosh, which have been applying pressure on Microsoft ever since the release of Vista. Some have ventured to say that the new edition of Microsoft is a “Linux killer” and poses a serious problem to an Apple company that has railed against Microsoft for the criticism Vista received (Gralla). As good as this sounds for Microsoft, however, it remains clear that Windows 7 fails to outperform Ubuntu in almost all categories that deserve real attention, like size on disk (5GB to 3GB), boot time (Linux loading 40% and shutting down 39% faster), memory usage (Linux using 55% less at boot and 40% with applications running), and benchmarks significantly higher (almost 17%). These statistics point to the fact that Linux has always been faster, lighter, and quicker than its Microsoft competitors (Daengbo). However, for many reasons, Microsoft still dominates with a much larger market share. The reasons for this are to too numerous to cover adequately, but they deal primarily with the accessibility of Microsoft operating systems, their reputation and history, and compatibility with popularly used programs. More important that the comparison to Ubuntu’s Linux, perhaps, is the comparison between Microsoft 7 and Microsoft’s largest competitor, Apple and its Macintosh line of personal computers. The debate between Windows and Mac is one of the most divisive issues in American culture, and valid arguments are given by both sides. Like with Windows and Ubuntu, the issue cannot necessarily be reduced to one single problem with either. One’s selection of a personal computer strongly depends upon one’s needs and wants when it comes to a product and many favor Windows for its seasoned reputation providing reliable software. Windows 7, according to one blogger, is “the first serious competition from Microsoft in quite some time” (Wilcox). In many ways this is true, when considered in the context of what many regard as a failure in Vista to appease customer’s expectations. In many ways, the debate between Windows and Mac extends beyond the actual product, to many other factors such as personal preference and cost. As one blogger suggests, Windows 7 adds something to the equation: while there is still no compelling reason for happy Mac customers to switch to Windows, there is finally no real reason for users “stuck” with Windows to make the switch to Mac (Betteridge). Microsoft has recently been advertising the notion that Mac computers are, on the whole, much more expensive than their own. Microsoft also emphasizes the limited number of variability in Mac computers, compared to the many companies like Dell, HP, and others that produce PCs running Windows. This fact makes it difficult to argue for Macintosh in a situation where a customer has a highly specialized need for a machine (Betteridge). Windows 7 does, it seems, bring to the table many advantages to keeping one’s Windows-based PC. The features Microsoft has decided to add (and subtract) from its previous effort at making a great operating system makes many things worth rethinking. It seems that Microsoft gained much from its experience with Vista, including a better way of marketing itself to the public. Bloggers are nearly unanimous in their praise of the new system, especially in comparing it to Vista. The praise usually mirrors the sentiment that 7 is everything that Vista could have been (or should have been) when it was originally released. As Bill Gates said, the idea behind 7 is making the personal computer “personal” again, and making it more “user-centric”. Playing music, sharing photos, joining networks, and talking to friends is much easier and faster. The entire system has added a distinct air of simplicity completely absent from the meaty SP1 of Vista. But it is important to remember that Windows 7 is still in development, despite its already widespread use on the net. There are still improvements that need to be made before being released on the market and these improvements will augment the features discussed previously. Even though 7 is by no means a revolution in personal computing, it at least realizes the dream Vista was meant to fulfill, nearly two years after its release. Windows 7 offers numerous improvements over its predecessors both in Vista and XP. Although it is outperformed by Ubuntu’s Linux, this new operating system makes Microsoft competitive again, and should secure their share of the market for a long period of time into the future. These improvements encompass the speed of the machine, the compatibility it has with programs, and the ease with which users can use the system. Renai LeMay says, “In general, this signals that Microsoft has spent a lot of effort with Windows 7 on delivering a solid operating system that won't "wow" anyone but will satisfy them on a much deeper level. In other words, just what the doctor—and the customers—ordered” (LeMay). Works Cited Betteridge, Ian. Windows 7, Mac OS X and Ubuntu: A Tale of Three Operating Systems. 11 April 2009. 26 April 2009 . Daengbo. Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha4 vs. Windows 7 Beta. 12 February 2009. 26 April 2009 . Flynn, David. Dell: many users will skip Vista, “go straight from XP to Windows 7”. 3 November 2008. 25 April 2009 . Gralla, Preston. Windows 7: Microsoft's Linux killer? 31 October 2008. 26 April 2009 . Kennedy, Randall C. Under the Hood, Windows 7 Is Vista's Twin. 10 November 2008. 25 April 2009 . —. Windows 7: The good, the bad, and the ugly. 17 March 2009. 25 April 2009 . Kingsley-Hughes, Adrian. Windows 7 beta 1 performance - How does the OS compare to Vista and XP? 1 January 2009. 26 April 2009 . LeMay, Renai. Windows 7 beta: First impressions. 7 January 2009. 25 April 2009 . Levy, Steven. Bill Gates on Vista and Apple's 'Lying' Ads. 3 February 2007. 25 April 2009 . McMillan, Robert and Elizabeth Montalbano. No Rush to Adopt Vista. 28 December 2006. 25 April 2009 . Mintz, Jessica. Six months on, Vista users still griping. 13 July 2007. 26 April 2009 . Whittaker, Zack. Some minor criticisms of the Windows 7 beta. 29 December 2008. 25 April 2009 . Wilcox, Joe. A Tale of Two Switchers. 10 April 2009. 26 April 2009 . Read More