Windows 7 is great… no wait!
Announced by CEO Steve Ballmer at the 2009 International CES trade show, the first public beta version of Windows 7 attracted more than 2.5 million visitors who overloaded the download servers. Microsoft is releasing the new operating system for usability testing. Windows 7 has been installed and reported to run smoothly on a broad range of computers, from netbooks to desktops.
Microsoft initially planned to phase out Windows XP by the end of 2008 to have customers switch to Vista but things did not go according to plan. The ill-released operating system was a marketing failure and was too ressource-hungry to run on netbooks, an emerging market Microsoft can’t afford to stay out of. The Redmond giant reluctantly agreed to continue shipping XP and seems to have been keeping busy on an allegedly new operating system fast enough to supposedly replace XP on netbooks. But the opera is not over until the fat lady sings.
It appears that Microsoft has once again focused on performance and forgotten about security: Windows 7 appears to be less secure and needs the addition of third party add-ons to be kept safe from attackers. A brand spanking new operating system that is as vulnerable as the previous ones kinds of defeats the purpose.
Update: a February 5, 2009 article from The Inquirer titled Windows 7 less secure than Vista explains how “It seems that some of the changes that make Windows 7 look so attractive have been made by removing some of the security features that we hated in Vista.”
