A new chapter
The various issues surrounding the launch of Vista have been exhaustively documented over the past two or three years. However, sentiment seems to be a lot more positive towards Windows 7 (W7), the release candidate of which is already publicly available.
Talking to Microsoft execs, we get the impression they see the launch of W7 as an opportunity to draw a line under the whole Vista affair and effectively say "This is what we meant to do".
We spoke to Laurence Painell (pictured) - the Windows 7 product manager in the UK - and Simon Aldous - the UK partner group manager - to find out what Microsoft intends to do differently this time.
"We learnt from the launch of Vista," said Painell, and when we asked him what the main issues were with Vista he said: "One was performance and the other was application compatibility. We've worked hard with ecosystem partners to ensure they have compatible products on the shelves at launch."
One attempt to circumvent some compatibility issues has been the inclusion of an ‘XP mode' in W7. However, there are already reports that XP mode doesn't work on some hardware. "XP mode is only available in the ‘professional' and ‘ultimate' versions," said Painell. "We're working with all our solution providers to ensure they're articulating the hardware requirements to run XP mode. The chipset needs to support virtualisation."