Microsoft finally admits Vista was a mistake, kinda.

Hence the introduction of Windows 7 which is purported to fix Vista’s mistakes that made a supporter like me shy away. Recently M$ demoed their inaccurately christened Windows 7 (Google it for the argument that it is NOT 7) and vowed to right the wrongs Vista was panned for. Learning from the apparent mistakes, it is suppose to fix everything we (I) hated about the experience that was Vista.

A road map has even been laid out for the release of Windows 7 and during the recent Professional Developers Conference (PDC) a pre-beta version was given out that demonstrated new features. First public beta will only be distributed out only early next year so hold on tight Malaysian developers; I’m not holding my breath.

M$ has finally admitted that some of the criticism are valid as they failed to adequately prepare its hardware, software and peripheral partners for the Vista release although it was more than 5 years in the making. Were the developers sleeping on the job?!

What I am looking forward is the fix to the most annoying User Account Control feature (UAC) which annoyed the crap out of me. UAC is suppose to prevent users without admin access from making changes, in theory that’s great but the problem was authorized users were also prevented from accessing applications and features they should be able to use. What an utter calamity beyond recognition in implementation. Again M$ has admitted that the use of UAC went a bit too far but it was a result to make the operating system more secure. Yeah right! I think its borders too much on the invasive side of things. Where is all that preaching about UX (user experience)?

The only notable addition to the handful of new features Windows 7 will have is its touch screen interface which allows users to use their fingertips and hand gestures to control applications. Providing your laptop/desktop is a touch screen enabled. Haven’t thought this through again have they? It even seems like they are playing catchup to Apple’s multi-touch experience with the mouse and not doing a very convincing job at that.

At this point I personal am still skeptical as at the end of the day this is still running of the legacy architecture which is FAT32/NTFS. We were supposed to have a new file system that would stream line and revolutionize the way we run operating systems. What we get is an overweight bloated OS that is saddle with too many confinements that come with building on top of old architectures and will not be able to compete with the likes of the uBuntu, OSX and linux out there. This is truly a sad state of affairs for consumers to have to resort to running anything but Microsoft products which we are already familiar with.