Windows 7 Multi-Touch Technology

Microsoft has been in stealth mode ever since they started working on Windows 7. Given the debacle that was Vista this seems a wise move. We all remember the initial Vista (aka Longhorn) promises that were constantly scaled back. This time they seem to have learned from the mistake and are keeping mum about the feature set. That is until now.

For the first time we have a peek at one of the Windows 7 features, multi-touch support. See it in action here.

Windows Rant

It looks very impressive but I am not convinced at this point that it is anything more than a nice toy. This is the equivalent of the Vista toy called speech recognition. Both of these are great technologies and there are definitely some niche applications that will find them invaluable, but in the real world they are just toys.

Don’t believe me? What percentage of Vista users actually use speech recognition once they finish playing with it for fun? Not many. The same will be true for multi-touch support. After a few weeks I bet you’re still using that traditional mouse and keyboard. Sure you show off the cool photos application to your relatives but then you go back to the mouse for playing Crysis and the keyboard for writing a letter.

Now I wouldn’t mind in the slightest if these toys were added on top of a perfectly stable and efficient base operating system. But it seems to me they’re neglecting the basics to add the marketing fluff.

If you use a Mac or Linux then you will take for granted the ability to have multiple desktop spaces that you can quickly switch between. A simple feature that would take Microsoft about 2 days to implement and yet we don’t have it built in. Sure I can use a third party utility to do this but I shouldn’t have to.

How come I have to pay for Windows Defender? I just paid good money for an operating system and then they want me to pay extra to protect myself against vulnerabilities in their own product! Surely nowadays anti-virus and anti-malware software is considered a base feature of the operating system and not a luxury add-on. Instead I have to pay them or Symantec et al a tax for being connected to the internet.

If you think these do not represent the basics of the system then how about something as simple as the shutdown options. Read the excellent Joel post to see what I mean.

What I want is a world class operating system. It should run for 12 months without needing a reboot or producing a blue screen of death. It should be safe to use connected to the internet and efficient in the use of resources. Once I have that you can stick as many toys on top as you like.

Surely this is not too much to ask from a company with a zillion employees and a zillion dollars in the bank. They recruit enough people from Stanford and MIT that at least the shut down options should be done properly. Microsoft, please please please get Windows 7 right for all our sakes.

Rant over I can go back to watching a Channel 9 video I downloaded. Of course I cannot actually watch it using Windows Media Player 11 on my 64bit Vista. The sound playback works but the video picture does not. So instead I am forced into copying each video I want to watch into a 32bit Vista virtual machine that does playback perfectly. Just another joy of Vista moment that actually brought on the rant in the first place.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.