Vista is out. It is sitting on our shelves installed on shiny new monster PC’s using 700mb of RAM, just sitting there, waiting for the next customer.

The world almost universally hates it.

It is buggy, slow on an average PC, and just not good enough.

So now MS is pushing for Windows 7 to be released.

As of now, there is only one unreliable claim of someone getting their hands on Windows 7M1 and playing around with it. Gossip on teh intarweb is rife, with screenshots, guesses and wild claims.

Most of it is fake, and unsubstantiated.

Why am I writing about it then?

Well, MS is claiming that Vista has logged fewer vulnerabilities in its first year than other OSes.

The thing is; how many problems were logged per install of Vista?

And then there is Windows 7. Why is Microsoft pushing Windows 7 development so hard if Vista (which was an interim release after all) is doing so well?

Apparently, if you sieve through all the claims flying around the web, Windows 7 might ship anything from late 2008 to late 2009. Wikipedia projects a shipping date of mid 2009, three years after Vista’s release.

Let’s say Wikipedia is correct and Windows 7 does not get delayed, in that time Ubuntu would have released at least 3 new versions from today, and since the release date of Vista on 30 Jan 2007, Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy have been released. In April 2008 Hardy Heron will be completed, and then in October the next, April 2009 the next, and Windows 7 would ship somewhere between Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10.

By my count that would be at least 5 (Five) releases since Vista, and six or more if Windows 7 is delayed.

So with the leaps and bounds that Ubuntu – and any properly maintained Linux distro for that matter – is improving with every release, I fear that MS is fighting an uphill battle.

Sure there are less bugs logged for the past year compared to other Oses, but those other Oses do not stagnate, and are actively pushing the frontier of OS development. Linux distributions log bugs for not only the OS, but also for every package installed together with the OS, whereas MS logs only bugs in the OS itself.

So, Windows 7, Server 2008, whatever – Microsoft is losing it’s lead in software innovation, and I have the suspicion that they have lost the lead already.

Don’t even get me started on the software quality side…

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