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When eWEEK Labs published their Products of the Year list for 2009 one of the highest profile omissions was Microsoft's Windows 7. Why? The overall impression felt by the magazine's panel was that "while Windows 7 may prove to be the best overall operating system Microsoft has delivered, in our tests it provided only incremental improvements over a highly unpopular predecessor - many of the critical improvements in Windows 7 were actually included first in Windows Vista."
Expanding on the incremental improvements theme, Andrew Garcia of eWEEK Labs went on, "Do administrators really need the added complexity (security, management and licensing) of a second operating system to support legacy applications, as XP Mode requires? And, if XP Mode is so critical, why won't it play nicely with Microsoft's latest communications technologies, such as DirectAccess?"
Perhaps there was never any mileage in Garcia's cheeky suggestion that XP legacy applications should have been handled in a virtual machine running on Linux, but his comments on the security aspects of Windows 7 are worth considering. "The OS could have been all about securing data and the user experience, but instead Microsoft sacrificed that objective on the altar of usability and profitability - toning down the protections afforded by UAC, limiting the availability of hard disk and removable drive encryption to the most expensive SKUs, and even replacing and limiting a security feature once available to all business SKUs (Software Restrictions Policies) with a similar one available only to the Enterprise and Ultimate SKUs (AppLocker)."
Garcia recognises that enterprise users of Microsoft have minimal options and he expects that most will opt for Windows 7 as support for XP dwindles and its age becomes ever more apparent. But, given Microsoft's occasionally patronising attitude to its customers, Garcia's final comment is timely: "Customers just need to ask themselves if it's the right choice for today and tomorrow." |
