Is Windows 7 fit for business?

Windows 7’s early appearance perhaps seems an indication that Microsoft has understood what many of us perceive to be wrong with Vista, but is it?

Despite the fact that Microsoft has never admitted that there is any problem with Vista, the fact that they are rushing Windows 7 to an eager public is a sign that all is not well. Not as many enterprises have opted to deploy Vista as expected, and Windows XP shows a remarkable tendency to live on as the various “down-grade” and dual licence options on new machines demonstrate. (see XP Still Rules)

The reason for this isn’t easy to pin down, mainly because it’s a collection of small factors, any of which will seem important to one user and completely irrelevant to other users.

One fairly universal complaint is that Vista is bloated and needs a lot more hardware to make it work well compared to XP. Microsoft tacitly acknowledges this problem and has even continued to make XP available on small and reduced power hardware. Windows 7 is promised to be leaner and less bloated – so much so that currently Microsoft is talking about making a dedicated version of it available for less powerful machines. However, having yet another marketing version of Windows is not too welcome.

From an enterprise point of view the undoubted focus of Vista on home and gaming use certainly didn’t help. New user interfaces are attractive but do you really want your business desktops looking like a games arcade? It is difficult to know whether or not Windows 7 addresses the “serious look” issue because, while the recent beta certainly looks less dressy, the default choice of a blue Siamese fighting fish as the desktop background doesn’t inspire confidence.



Equally much of the coverage and publicity concerning what is new in Windows 7 has emphasised home use. Significant new features are fairly difficult to find in Windows 7 but when pressed the new Homegroup approach to networking comes to the top of the pile. This is designed to make home networking easier and to make it simpler to move your portable from an enterprise to a home network without compromising the security you have spent so long setting up on the enterprise network.



The big problem is that nothing much has been done to make networking in general easier to work with if you don’t know what you are doing. Layers have been added to hide the underlying structure from the user. For example, you still can’t directly reset a network connection via the Network and Sharing Center – you have to waste time while it goes though a (usually useless) diagnostic. In most cases the interface serves to move you away from the information and control that you need to quickly solve a problem when you know what you are doing. One classic example of this is the fact that the Control Panel now has no 'Classic' view so you're forced to work through the very long list of choices.

 
 
Just about the only enterprise feature is the ability to make a secure connection to an enterprise network without a VPN – as long as you are using Windows Server 2008. A business edition of Windows should be making far more of the services available on an enterprise network – Active Directory, central administration and security – out of the box.

In the usability area it is true that Windows 7 has cleaned up the over-complex Vista interface and introduced the concept of libraries, i.e. groups of files and folders that might reside in different locations but overall there is nothing major. Put simply a Vista user would be at home but an XP user would still have to wonder how to do things. One area where the jury is still out has to be reliability. Microsoft is making claims about Windows 7 being more reliable – hence tacitly admitting that things weren’t perfect under Vista – but until the final release who knows.

Many of the serious problems with Vista – the Explorer shell crashing, file copying problems, SMB incompatibilities and general instability – were solved or lessened in Vista SP1 and as Windows 7 builds on the Vista Kernel we can expect the situation to improve, but only testing the final version in the real world will confirm this suspicion. You have to ask the question of why and how Vista was released with such “features” in the first place.

Overall Windows 7 is really a Vista upgrade. The good points are that the system has been tidied up; the bad points are that very little has been done to make the system more suitable for serious use. Currently Microsoft is saying that if you plan to move to Windows 7 you should upgrade to Vista now because the move from XP to 7 is harder than XP to Vista to 7. This is true because the big step is from XP to the Vista environment – again proving that Windows 7 is best viewed as a mid-life upgrade to Vista.

Seen in this light Windows 7 should almost certainly be made available as a free service pack to anyone who has already made the move to Vista – after all Windows 7 is just Vista done right.