Now before you all starting thinking the this cranky old fart has gone off his nutter let me clarify – I am not trying to make any connections between WinME and Vista based on it’s underlying code base or the user interface. My thoughts center more around marketing, technological and user mindset shift.
I have long held that WinME was intentionally released the way it was in order to encourage people to move more quickly to the XP platform when released. WinME was never intended to be a commercial success; breaking even on investment was fine but Microsoft needed some way to prompt users to change to a newer OS when it was available.
WinME accomplished this very nicely and with what is widely recognized and being a bad Windows release. While setting up a soon to be eager path to XP it also did one other thing along the way. With WinME we saw the first inkling of what was going to be in store for us as far as the user interface was concerned. So even before XP was entering closed testing we were being prepped as to what to expect UI wise.
With Vista we have yet another very troublesome release which many are hoping that SP1 will fix. Again we have been moved to a new UI as part of supposedly improving the underlying code and bringing the 64bit architecture to a wider audience beyond the corporate IT world and power users. As well we get a wider standard implementation of the .NET Framework and a standard way to automatically update core parts.
However what we are also starting to hear is the rumbling of Windows 7 starting with some fundamental changes to the whole way Windows is packaged, installed and maintained. More than a few times I have written about the need to modularize the whole Windows experience and by what is being said so far this is exactly what they are doing; even to the point that Windows Server 2008 is where you will see the first inklings of these changes.
Microsoft is not giving an RTM date for Windows 7 but word has been passed around to look for 2010 but I think that it could possibly show up in 2009. I also believe that this may be the real next version of Windows and Vista could easily be regulated to a place in the history books alongside WinME.
As WinME was a case of sleight of hand to keep everyone busy while Microsoft prepped XP for the mass audience they could very well be doing exactly the same thing with Vista. Make a few buck, keep everyone engaged – good or bad – and us it to get all the building block of the real next Windows in place.
