Has Microsoft Redeemed Itself?

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InfoWorld looks back on 2009 and asks the question, “has Microsoft redeemed itself?” If you feel your head involuntarily nodding right now, you are probably a Windows 7 user. :)

To combat the Vista woes, Microsoft stopped defending the OS and began aggressively marketing Windows 7, its replacement, with a broad public beta cycle that saw hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of users try it more than a half-year before its formal release on Oct. 22.
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I'd say so. The low prices on 7 helped a lot, as did being able to upgrade from XP.
 
As far as Windows goes there's little doubt that 7 is a hit. Now Windows 7 Mobile needs to be the same. But 2009 while rough business wise for Microsoft has seen Windows back on top.
 
for the average user, I think so. While Win7, fundamentally, isn't much different than vista, they've done a much better job marketing it and changing peoples perception of windows (and MS) in general.

honestly, I think they've done pretty good since 2000/XP (ME was such a pos), although in an effort to win over others, they've went above and beyond which is good for everyone :)
 
I'd be willing to say they attained redemption with Vista SP1.

7 is very nice, I just get tired of having to listen to people rag on Vista then switch to extolling the virtues of the divinely inspired Win 7.

If you're still clutching XP with white knuckles (and have atleast a dual core something and a couple gigs of ram) give 7 a try. I installed Ult 64bit a couple days after it released and haven't booted back into Vista since. I killed my XP install almost 2 years ago. Even in Vista Compatibility mode works far better then it ever did in XP.

Biggest problem is now I only have 1 install left for Peggle Deluxe :(
 
I became a HUGE fan of Microsoft when Office 2007 came out. The new UI saved me hours of time in my college courses, and the fact that it was so easy to make professional reports and presentations was a huge help too. Windows 7 confirms it. Bing solidifies it. All major improvements, IMO.
 
Can't help but say that when the "professionals" at Microsoft decide to try another version of the OS and do it right wouldn't it be bad if they failed again :) .
 
I was never really down on Microsoft that much anyway. XP was damn near perfect and I used it for almost 10 years. The next OS I used was Win7 and its even better than XP! What little experience I had with Vista, it didnt seem all that bad to me really. I didnt use it as extensively as a lot of others tho.

But bottom line, Win7 is a home run IMO.
 
I'm a Unix guy through and through but I have to be honest, Windows 7 is quite nice. Other than the out of the box missing right click search function, I don't really have any complaints. People say its a tad slower than XP but it seems a bit faster on my machine. I just use it on my gaming machine so I don't sit in front of it all day, but so far I dig it. I used 2000 forever and switched to XP about 2 years ago.
 
I thought they redeemed themselves for WinMe with 2k and Xp. Vista, did not require redemption imho. Win 7 is a truly great OS, but that does not make Vista suddenly suck. The Mojave experiment showed most of the popular hatred for Vista was just bs. many people hated it cause everyone else said it sucks, many other because it was not Xp. I don't really think MS needs to redeem themselves for what was, by and large, mob ignorance and/or hatred of change.
 
If they have anything to redeem at all, it is prolly some of their past business practices.
 
dr.stevil said:
for the average user, I think so. While Win7, fundamentally, isn't much different than vista
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I disagree, few people who use windows care what it looks like under the hood. They care about the experience and Win7 is a way better experience. Lots of cool tricks (and I really like the parallel windows thing, can't stop using it). In addition, it doesn't crash, doesn't fill the cpu simply by being, doesn't take 10 minutes to boot and shut down, and comes back from sleep almost instantly. I tried vista installs three times for various reasons and not one of them would work. Period. The first kept crashing just doing hw on the web. The second filled a cpu too much to cpu decode hd video (while both xp and 7 are fine), the third blue screened every time I put it to sleep and sometimes at other times. The fact that Win7 does work, and then also adds nice features makes it not fundamentally the same.
 
GORANKAR said:
I thought they redeemed themselves for WinMe with 2k and Xp. Vista, did not require redemption imho. Win 7 is a truly great OS, but that does not make Vista suddenly suck. The Mojave experiment showed most of the popular hatred for Vista was just bs. many people hated it cause everyone else said it sucks, many other because it was not Xp. I don't really think MS needs to redeem themselves for what was, by and large, mob ignorance and/or hatred of change.
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I don't know about the experiment you talk about but I will tell you this... I get home from work before my wife... so I'm sitting there on the couch playing xbox and she walks through the door and the first thing out of her mouth is "what the fuck is vista?! The IT guys put it on my computer and I HATE it! Its slow and asks me a million questions! I can't get any work done with that shit! How do I take it off?!" I just laughed at her and nodded. :D
 
I have to say yes for me with W7 its very stable I was able to upgrade for a very low price for me MS this year made a lot of right steps in the right direction.
 
Ibanezfoo said:
I don't know about the experiment you talk about but I will tell you this... I get home from work before my wife... so I'm sitting there on the couch playing xbox and she walks through the door and the first thing out of her mouth is "what the fuck is vista?! The IT guys put it on my computer and I HATE it! Its slow and asks me a million questions! I can't get any work done with that shit! How do I take it off?!" I just laughed at her and nodded. :D
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Haha.. love that little story.
 
The other thing that MS do now that they didnt years ago is when they cock up they apologise and sort it out pretty quick. When the Zunes went down new years day within a couple of hours the MS guys had posted up the solution (wait till 12.00PM GMT 2nd Jan). That was new years day!

They now appear to listen to customers rather than just themselves. They are trying to work with some open source groups. They are not afraid to let stuff out for folks to try to get feedback.

I have to say I'd rather try to work with MS than some other large IT companies.

The fact they make an operating system that 99.99% of the time works pretty well with billions of different hardware combinations from expensive GPUs to $1 USB Ebay crap is an incredible technical achievment that far too many are just too ignorant to admit.
 
The amazing thing about windows 7 is that once I upgraded to it on my T61, my desire for a SSD went way, way down. It is so damn fast that I literally can't imagine a SSD being any faster except on massive file transfers. Latency is just a non-issue. The windows appear as fast as I can click them.
 
Honestly, I have more problems with hardware under win7 x64 than Vista x64.

My ATECH card reader wigs out once in a while and will not read / hangs up / keeps flashing. Requires a reboot. Sometimes I have to reboot a few times before it will work. Worked fine under Vista 64.

My autorun doesn't work - if I right click PLAY on a DVD that doesn't work either - I get no sound from DVDs. Couldn't find a solution.

That said I love 7. The interface, the task bar, ease of install, the new explorer, libraries, etc. Less disk thrashing (not that that matters now that I'm on SSD). All good stuff. I put up with a few hardware quirks in exchange for the much improved user experience.
 
Ibanezfoo said:
I don't know about the experiment you talk about but I will tell you this... I get home from work before my wife... so I'm sitting there on the couch playing xbox and she walks through the door and the first thing out of her mouth is "what the fuck is vista?! The IT guys put it on my computer and I HATE it! Its slow and asks me a million questions! I can't get any work done with that shit! How do I take it off?!" I just laughed at her and nodded. :D
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Sounds like her IT dept should not have put a new OS on an old computer, combined with natural human resistance to change to me. The bugging her with UAC prompts stuff usually goes away once the PC is set up to the users liking.

Google the Mojave experiment, it's good for a laugh. It kind of tosses the people that hated it without ever trying it on decent hardware under the bus, and makes some of the participants look like idiots, but it is still funny.
 
GreenMonkey said:
Honestly, I have more problems with hardware under win7 x64 than Vista x64.

My ATECH card reader wigs out once in a while and will not read / hangs up / keeps flashing. Requires a reboot. Sometimes I have to reboot a few times before it will work. Worked fine under Vista 64.
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Ah, that reminded me of a problem I have with 7. The USB doesn't seem to initialize properly when it comes out of hibernation. I have to unplug and replug nostromo speedpad to get it to work. Mildly annoying but not that big of a deal really.
 
Ibanezfoo said:
I don't know about the experiment you talk about but I will tell you this... I get home from work before my wife... so I'm sitting there on the couch playing xbox and she walks through the door and the first thing out of her mouth is "what the fuck is vista?! The IT guys put it on my computer and I HATE it! Its slow and asks me a million questions! I can't get any work done with that shit! How do I take it off?!" I just laughed at her and nodded. :D
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vista was born from ignorant average users (looks at anyone over 40 who is not a gamer or IT person)who need there hands held to not completely destory their machines with crap they click online.. that said the probelms is these same idiots will just click thru the uac warnings and screw the comp up anyways thus making it a waste of time to implement. imo
 
The hate for Vista that I've seen were from people who didn't know that right click meant the right mouse button or the "computer" as not the big TV looking thing on your desk.
OR
Internet Explorer is NOT the internet, it's just a portal to the internet. Neither is AOL or MSN.
 
Yeah, but there should have been bigger discounts offered to the group of Vista Ultimate users that got screwed.

Actuary said:
I'd say so. The low prices on 7 helped a lot, as did being able to upgrade from XP.
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To combat the Vista woes
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I'm still wondering what those woes were.
Other than the RC, I had no trouble with Vista on any machine, from several desktops to older laptops.
 
Vista was fine. I wouldn't say they redeemed themselves, but rather they fooled the public into believing they did. Vista haters were uninformed, not tech-savvy, and/or victims of blind brand loyalty.
 
My uninformed, non tech-savvy hatred of Vista came from having to go for long walks in the park when browsing folders on my computer (let alone on the network). I agree, however, with the comment that SP1 solved a lot of that hassle. I think Windows 7 is full of "nice touches" but I think the eased up UAC is an improvement. Obviously, security advocates think that pulling back on this is a move in the wrong direction, but observing human behavior has taught us that throwing up prompts like that over and over almost always results in muscle memory taking over and clicking "OK" to make the nuisance box go away. It doesn't serve to educate the user or protect them from themselves (as it is intended.)

I loved 2000 and for a few months wasn't sold on XP but it grew on me, and I still think it is a masterpiece, particularly in performance and longevity. Windows Home Server is also a lesser known product of Microsoft that deserves some notice. As much as it can be argued that viable backup solutions (and media sharing) existed before WHS, it really did come together in a very nice package with stupidly simple setup for even the laziest of users. It is absolutely the first time I have had a system that ensures daily backups of my important files.
 
Oh yeah... Vista also cornered the market on making navigating your Control Panel and Networking Settings into a nightmare! Windows 7 cleaned this up some, but I still can't understand why almost every click opens a new window for some of these settings.
 
Azhar said:
Vista was fine. I wouldn't say they redeemed themselves, but rather they fooled the public into believing they did. Vista haters were uninformed, not tech-savvy, and/or victims of blind brand loyalty.
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...after SP2

It's too late in the game trying to convince [H'ers] that Vista was either crap or simply OK. People like new shyt whether it's good or not.

Vista is dead. Bury it and move on. W7 is the worthy successor to XP. There's no reason to hold onto Vista love at this point.
 
I like Windows 7, but to be honest, there are still a ton of features that could be added, primarily in the vein of more intuitive customization options. For example, I installed an application suite earlier, and figured it would be nice to pin the directory to the start menu so I could simply mouse over to select the appropriate application I wished to launch ... but no such option exists, at least not which is immediately apparent. Can't sort or rearrange items such as "Games" or "Computer" on the start menu, either, or at least not via a method which is immediately apparent.

Tons of stuff like this I've noticed over the past few months. When an operating system allows a person to just do what they want to do, when they want to do it, without hassle, then it will be near perfect.

Really, this is just a shinier, remixed version of the same old Windows. Microsoft still has a long way to go if they want to make a truly exception, innovative operating system.
 
ICOM said:
...after SP1

It's too late in the game trying to convince a couple very stubborn [H'ers] that Vista was either crap or simply OK. People like new shyt whether it's good or not.

Vista is dead. Bury it and move on. W7 is the worthy successor to XP. There's no reason to hold onto Vista love at this point.
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Fixed :rolleyes:
 
I switched to Vista and never looked back at XP again. I'm further pleased by windows 7. I could agree with precariousgray in that it would be nice to be able to juggle around "Computer" "Music" and such in the start menu, but it's really a small complaint. I've only had one real issue so far, and it just baffled me. I couldn't select Windows Media Center as the default player for dvd movies, it's there in the OS but I could find no way to choose anything other than WMP (without installing any other software). A registry tweak fixed it, but it was just an odd one to me.

Microsoft didn't need to redeem themselves to me. I was able to get on board with that student discount that was offered; let me buy windows 7 earlier than I was expecting and I've been enjoying the experience.
 
I loved Vista and dropped XP within a week of its release. 7 is good too, but I'm not in a hurry to upgrade all of my systems.

Perhaps a better question would be "has Microsoft's marketing team redeemed themselves?"
 
precariousgray said:
Really, this is just a shinier, remixed version of the same old Windows. Microsoft still has a long way to go if they want to make a truly exceptional, innovative operating system.
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daglesj said:
The fact they make an operating system that 99.99% of the time works pretty well with billions of different hardware combinations from expensive GPUs to $1 USB Ebay crap is an incredible technical achievment that far too many are just too ignorant to admit.
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I truly like this as an answer. Who else even makes an operating system that can handle all these different devices/programs/uses with this type of result?
 
Everything about Windows 7 is great. (UI / cost / especially networking)
The recent additions to XBL are great.
MS Office 2010 (beta) is great.
The Zune HD is fantastic, as well as the new Zune software.

It's nice to see Microsoft focused and improving products again. Redemption achieved.

Now get to work on that Mobile OS! You're going to need a miracle.
 
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