San Francisco (CA) – A high-ranking Microsoft executive has conceded that the initial release of Windows 7 will not lead to a significant increase in PC sales. According to senior VP Bill Veghte, enthusiasm over Windows 7 is likely to be “drowned” by the macroeconomic environment.
“History would tell us that generally as you ship a Windows release into the market – the bump is very modest. You will see a little bit, but it is modest,” Veghte explained in a company webcast. “As the macro environment comes back, people will have to buy new PCs. People aren’t using PCs any less.”
It should be noted that Microsoft has done its utmost to convince skeptical Windows users that the latest iteration of its OS will “run better” than Vista.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had a version of Windows that will actually run better [than the previous version] on the hardware that most customers have,” spun Mike Nash, a Microsoft corporate VP. According to Nash, Windows 7 will function faster on systems such as netbooks, which have less processing power and memory than other computers.
Windows 7 is also expected to provide a number of user-friendly features, such as native support for touch screens, advanced desktop searches and PC-to-PC file transfers. In addition, the Windows 7 Touch Pack is packaged with Surface Globe – a digital photo organizer – and Surface Lagoon, an interactive underwater screen saver.
Apple, however, remains utterly unimpressed with Windows 7 and has taken the opportunity to extol the virtues of its flashy Snow Leopard. Indeed, Phillip Schiller recently told a rapt WWDC audience that Windows 7 will include the same flawed technology that plagued Vista and earlier versions of the OS, including a registry file, DLLs and UACs.
Schiller also claimed that Apple had adopted a totally different approach with Snow Leopard by refining 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects in Mac OS X. Specific improvements include:
- A more responsive Finder.
- Mail that loads messages 85 percent faster and conducts searches up to 90 percent faster.
- Time Machine with up to 50 percent faster initial backup.
- Dock with Exposé integration.
- 64-bit version of Safari 4 that boosts the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent.
“For the first time, system applications including Finder, Mail, iCal, iChat and Safari are 64-bit and Snow Leopard’s support for 64-bit processors makes use of large amounts of RAM, increases performance, and improves security while remaining compatible with 32-bit application. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) provides a revolutionary new way for software to take advantage of multicore processors,” Apple explained in a statement. “GCD is integrated throughout Snow Leopard, from new system-wide APIs to high-level frameworks and programming language extensions, improving responsiveness across the system. OpenCL, a C-based open standard, allows developers to tap the incredible power of the graphics processing unit for tasks that go beyond graphics.”
