Microsoft has experienced less than ideal response with their newest desktop operating system, Vista.  What is interesting in this, is that Vista is not a bad operating system, and there are many positive aspects to its design (security, backups, explorer improvements, etc).  It seems that the problems for Vista are twofold.  

First, it is a fairly demanding piece of software.  To fully leverage it, you need a pretty nice graphics card with 128Mb of ram, and least 1Gb of ram (preferably 2Gb).  Essentially, you need a pretty recent and robust system.  I’ve heard some say it’s comparable to XP on most systems, but I have seen many machines (especially laptops), that have performed very poorly from day one with Vista.  Many of the first systems released with Vista apparently weren’t truly capable of running the OS well.

Second, the UAC is annoying.  They erred on the side of irritating users unnecessarily, for the sake of security.  While making users “sign off” on installation of software, the UAC goes over the top and often asks for repeated approvals during otherwise straightforward tasks.

In spite of those issues, which could be considered minor in some circles, Vista struggles with its value-add over XP.  Many current XP users are happy with the software.  Now that yet another Service Pack has been released, it only extended the viability of the software, making an upgrade harder to justify.  If you throw in the potential compatibility issues with software, it gets hard to make a solid case for upgrading.

It seems as though Microsoft is now publicly looking past Vista.  In a fast turn of events, Windows 7 is coming out from behind the shadows, to give us a glimpse of where Microsoft is going with the new system.  Last night Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer spoke at the All Things D conference, and showed off a few aspects of the new system (mainly the multitouch).  Importantly though, they made it clear that Windows 7 will build off of the work done in Vista.  In some ways, a refinement of Vista, with additional capabilities. 

From those comments and the surrounding information, Windows 7 could be a win for Microsoft, especially as it will not suffer competition from XP so directly.  I can’t wait for 2009, so we can see what comes about.