So I’ve just been checking out the much hyped news that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer will be showing off Windows 7 and annoucing it officially at the D6 conference and like most of the other people who have looked this up since its publish online during the night are dismayed by the lack of information they actually gave.
Looking at the videos online of the event, Ballmer shows off a multi-touch application which appears to be a modified version of Microsoft Virtual Earth, but using some variant of the Microsoft Surface technology, while they also showed a Paint applicaton and a Photo Viewer both using multi-touch.
Now, whilst multi-touch is a good feature and seems to be the next steps for everyone in the industry it is not the be all and end all. I would much rather see and hear about what they are doing to make the OS better not just adding a new feature. I want to know about things like security, performance and things like that, or how about the SQL based file system that Vista was supposed to include.
Don’t get me wrong, I think and hope Windows 7 will be a good release for Microsoft because they released the cock up’s they made with Vista but I think they need to focus more on the reality of it and not the sugar coating as after all, joe public won’t hear anything about Windows 7 until a few months before it’s release where as the people who know about it already are the tech people who are interested in that side of it all.
I’m hoping that Microsoft will offer out Alpha and Beta testing for Windows 7 in high numbers as I would like to participate in one of the Microsoft OS beta’s as I seem to Beta everything else they do but OS’s.