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Windows 7 puts Vista into perspective: Only a 'failure' in retrospect

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For my 400th post on ZDNet, this is one mass response in reply to a barrage of emails I have had to suffer over the course of the last couple of weeks. It seems as though I, and the just-over ten thousand students on my university campus, are not the only ones complaining even still about the abomination that their respective university IT department, hand in hand with the devil itself, Microsoft, have bestowed upon us: forced through product lifecycle periods to upgrade our campus to "the latest and greatest". Feel free to detect any element of sarcasm in the last sentence.

Only short two weeks ago, I had high hopes for the upgrade. I genuinely thought that a new lease of life could be drawn through the lungs of Microsoft'. I was not only wrong, but overly optimistic. For those who have been reading since day one, I started with a touch of empathy towards the then-new operating system. Over time, and predominantly over the course of Windows 7's beta cycles, I became more attached to the lack of resource hogging, sluggishness and a general freshness which could only be rivalled by that of a gentle breeze on a summer's day in the countryside. But I did start off with a very good point. Vista back in the day was perfectly fine. Only in comparison to a better benchmark of Windows 7 do we start slating the former operating system. Something that widely popular blogger, Long Zheng, mentioned earlier on this morning on Twitter was this:

To begin, I start with the question as mentioned in the title. From there I hypothesise the potential failure of Windows 7 and look into the few people we can blame for the potentially epic failure of Microsoft's next operating system.

Who do we blame for Vista, and Windows 7's potential failure? -->

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posted by Zack Whittaker
October 19, 2009 @ 4:53 am

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