I picked up on this via Gringod’s twitter: Windows 7 will have an XP Mode, a virtualised environment but with the added bonus that it doesn’t create a new desktop, just virtualised application windows inside Windows 7 that are actually running on an XP SP3 VM.
At first it all sounds pretty damn good, paving the way for MS to ‘do an Apple’ and redesign things more fundamentally without having to worry about being backwards-compatible forever. However, there’s a catch – XP Mode will only be available to licensees of the Professional edition of Windows 7 or above, it will be missing from the entry-level versions. Gah.
Rant mode: all these versions of Windows are bloody stupid. It’s a client operating system for feck’s sake, it’s not an enterprise application where people have wildly different requirements. It sits on a bloody desk doing work for one user at a time, how realistically do you imagine that those tasks are highly partitionable? You know the argument that with Linux, things are too complicated because of the fragmentation? Well, then why are MS deliberately doing the same thing to their own product? It beggars belief.
The argument may be that only businesses and professional users need this backwards compatibility, to which I say total hogwash. I just can’t believe you would come up with basically a silver bullet for finally breaking away from the legacy of poor Windows OS design, and then say you won’t include it in every box, thereby leaving a class of users without the option to rely on that facility as a bridging point. You think only businesses have legacy apps? As a software guy, it seems a stupid decision motivated by the bean counters who want to find new and inventive ways to upsell to customers. The baby is most definitely surfing away on the bathwater.
For God’s sake MS, make this a standard feature. It looks excellent, but locking some customers away from it totally undermines it and just looks like greed. And really, think seriously about unifying your client OS offering into one product and limiting your bizarre urge to partition everything into 20 confusing editions to your higher-end server / developer products. A client OS should be a standard, simple affair.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Though I don’t condone MS’s general practices, I think the issue is that MS has always seen the Basic or Family or whatever editions of their OSes as intended to be really, really simple. So you’re saying it’s hogwash that people don’t have legacy apps- that is certainly true- but not the really green users out there (grandparents, families with young kids) – the marketing brochure type of customers. MS wants to give them, ironically enough, an Apple like experience. Pictures look like pictures, everything talks to you and is disneyfied and pleasant. So no backwards compatibility, etc. Now, you may posit, Apple does both in one fell swoop. But then you have MS’s business “geniuses”- up sell every feature to people. I’m not saying it’s either good or effective, but I’m just saying I think you overestimate MS’s perceived “base” users. They’re going after mom and pop who use Excel at work and Yahoo Mail at home, and collect photos and watch DVDs, that’s it.
April 25th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Sure, but one thing I’ve learned is that Mom & Pop with their machines over the years have accumulated a lot of stuff which they don’t like losing, and don’t necessarily want to buy new versions of just because they got a new OS on their swanky new laptop. It really pisses them off in fact if they can’t use their 6-year old application that they’ve never bothered to upgrade – precisely because they *are* such casual users, and don’t upgrade all the time like us enthusiasts – if something works and they like it, they’ll keep the damn thing for years! I’ve experienced this with the Vista “upgrade” process already, and this XPM would just solve it outright. Except that not everyone will have it.
It’s not like they’re selling Windows into a virgin market anymore, these so-called casual users have legacy issues just like business users. And if they’re going to be forced to start from scratch, well, why not go buy an Ubuntu-based netbook instead if it’s cheaper and they only do photos, web and email? This is the risk MS run by taking their market for granted. They shouldn’t be trying to compete directly with the bare-bones, do only the rudimentary basics market, because they will lose against the cheaper netbooks that don’t have the MS tax. A cheaper, standard Windows client OS would put them way back in the driving seat again (its where they started), I really don’t know why they continue to let others whittle it away from the both ends (Ubuntu at the bare-bones netbook end, OS X at the do-everything end).
April 26th, 2009 at 2:27 am
Yeah, fair enough
April 26th, 2009 at 5:44 am
I have heard this framed as the perfect way to secure adoption of Windows 7 by the businesses. Now if they have legacy applications they don’t have to worry about updating them during the switch.
April 26th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Indeed, and it sounds good. So why not make it standard?
April 27th, 2009 at 5:12 am
Easy, its the carrot to upsell people to the $$Ultimate$$ Edition.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Steve, you’re not considering all the people who don’t have a PC, or aren’t familiar with computers. I forgot the statistic, something like 6 billion people on the planet, only a few billion are using computers, so that leaves a few billion more to target. As Asi said in first post, they are trying to disneyfy everything and make it simple as pie to use. You can’t assume everybody uses computers because your circle of contacts uses computers.. you need to think on a worldwide scale.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Sure, but I’m saying if that’s their target, they have a serious fight on their hands regarding bare-bones machines. I personally don’t think they can win in the ’stripped down’ market, because Ubuntu netbooks do it cheaper. I think they would be far smarter to have a single version of the client OS, like OS X, that says here: have everything for a simple price, it does what it says on the tin. No ‘you can use X and Y, but you have to upgrade to get Z’. Honestly, why would people who are not already on the Windows gravy train buy a stripped-down Windows when they can get bare-bones functionality cheaper elsewhere? Especially as they migrate more and more of what they care about to the web?
I think MS is making a serious mistake with this. The way to get new people onto Windows is to give them value added features, not to try to compete with the race to the bottom on pricing / functionality. I seriously do not think they can differentiate themselves in that market. All they’ll probably do is to drive piracy of the more expensive versions.
April 30th, 2009 at 9:10 am
I really had liked this feature in every release of windows, and that would have been a far more sane choice as u say. Really casual users also need this feature not buisness users only, a big reason why Windows XP Professional became the standard edition almost everywhere. Same is going with Win7 also as it looks like.
April 30th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Pay Pay Pay for the fat guy or take some hassle and go cheap with Ubuntu. Thopugh if casual people take the final hassle and go Ubuntu then Microsoft is going to have lots of pain to lure them back. May be then it will have to offer a unified good Os at dirt cheap. hee hee.
May 5th, 2009 at 6:01 am
One reason I heard suggested for the lack of virtual XP in the “lower tiers”, is that this is due to the fact that most games don’t work in the emulator, so a lot of home users will just be disappointed, and a drag on Customer Support.
Apparently the idea for the emulated Windows XP was just so businesses would be encouraged to upgrade; they had no aspirations beyond that, because this is Microsoft we’re talking about.