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I am going to warn you of a few things before I get started on spilling my thoughts and impressions. First, I work for Microsoft, no reason to hide that little gem. Second, I tested Windows 7 in the alpha stage for a short period, and 3rd I started running Windows 7 beta on my work laptop last week. This review, however, is on the public beta that was released Friday. Windows 7 Ultimate beta build 7000.

Installation went off without a hitch. It was pretty speedy, a few reboots, and the machine was back up with two missing devices. Ironically one was the Microsoft VX-3000 Life Cam, which seems to require the “Life Cam Software Package” to work, and the other was a D-Link Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Lucky for me the motherboard’s Ethernet adapter was correctly installed so I swapped the Ethernet cable and went to the MS site to download the VX-3000 Vista driver. Windows 7 is compatible with Vista drivers so don’t expect the same problems people mentioned when Vista was released. I think everyone has caught up now and Vista drivers are available for everything you would likely use.

An interesting thing happened while I was surfing for the VX-3000 driver. A notification popped up to tell me that the D-Link Gigabit Ethernet adapter had been installed and was working. Apparently once you get online, Windows 7 starts actively searching for drivers it doesn’t have yet.

What’s New?

The new taskbar is quite different and despite the rumors you might hear, it is not in any way a copy of the OS X dock. Gone is the quick launch area and by default the only icons you have are Internet Explorer 8, a link to your libraries and Windows Media Player. When you launch an application it’s icon is added to the taskbar but without the textual description that you might remember in previous versions of Windows. This new application can then be “pinned” to the taskbar so even when it’s closed the icon will remain to prelaunch it quickly as well as access the new quick jump menus.

In the above image, the Windows logo is your new start button, Internet Explorer is pinned but not running, the folder you see is a quick link to your library folders (Photos, Documents, etc), the Media Player is also pinned but not running, Outlook is glossy because it’s running as well as Windows Live Writer which I am using to write this.

The new start menu is cleaned significantly from Vista, you have your recent applications, program listing, search box and links to all of the important locations on your computer.

If you notice the right arrows, applications that have been used will have quick access to recent documents.

The groundwork for this was laid in Vista and I think it’s a considerable upgrade from the never ending fly outs in Windows XP and 98 that sometimes required the most incredible dexterity with the mouse to keep from closing before you could get the item you needed selected… can you tell that bugged me a bit?

Now it’s totally fixed and works fantastic.

The other great improvement to the start and taskbar area are the application previews. I have loaded several applications to make the next screenshots useful.

This is a peek across both desktops with 3 Word documents, this blog post, Outlook, MS Paint, Windows Media Player, two Windows Explorer windows and Internet Explorer with four tabs open. That’s a lot of applications and a lot of clutter. If I were to try and find the Amazon tab in IE in Windows Vista or earlier, I would have to browse what would at this point be 10 taskbar buttons at the bottom with tiny application icons to find IE, and then open it and switch to the Amazon tab. Now when I simply hover over the IE icon in the taskbar, I see this:

I can quickly click the Amazon tab and jump to the right tab in the right application with one click, NICE! But what if your eyes aren’t as good as mine and you can’t tell in those little tabs which one is Amazon? Simply hover over each tab and you’ll see this:

Windows makes every other window except the one you are hovering over transparent so you can see exactly what is on the one you are hovering over no matter what is on top of it. Pretty slick if you ask me. All of your applications will now have these little previews. With supersized icons and real thumbnails, finding open applications and switching between windows has never been easier. It’s also important to remember that this is running blazing fast on a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo with 3GB of Ram and 256MB video card computer I built for about $350 @ Newegg.com.

While we are finding things, the new button at the bottom right of the task bar has two uses, clicking it makes all windows disappear until you click it again, hovering over it makes them all go transparent like the above screenshot so you can see if that file you are looking for is in fact on your desktop.

Let’s finish with the right side of the taskbar.

I have it set to show all task tray icons so you are seeing Outlook checking email, my antivirus, devices, notifications, network and sound. Also the time/date and the desktop preview button I mentioned earlier.

So you notice I mentioned notification icon. In past versions you got all sorts of notification icons from Windows for all sorts of things, now they are bundled in this new icon. Clicking it reveals the Action Center displayed on the right. This shows any notification messages all in once place.

It’s very unobtrusive and still keeps you notified of everything that is going on in your system. The flag glows red when it’s got a message for you.

There are some more graphical tweaks to the user interface, like the ability to maximize windows to half the screen instead of full screen, as well as being able to push an application to the top of the screen to maximize it and pull it back down to un-maximize it again.

The Sidebar

The Windows sidebar is gone, gadgets still exist however and you can place them anywhere on the desktop you like. This functionality did exist in Vista, but it was not well advertised and it was not the default behavior.

Networking

The new Network and Sharing center is much cleaner than before. The left panel gives you access to your hardware and advanced settings, and the main window displays your connection status, the networks you are connected to and how, and gives you the options to set up a network, connect to a network and make changes.

Another welcome improvement is network performance for Wireless Networks. This PC is a desktop PC with no wireless card but I can tell you from using my laptop that finding and connecting to wireless networks is not only easier, but drastically faster.

Control Panel

The new Control Panel style that began in Windows XP and Vista is now the standard organization in 7. You can easily find the items instead of looking through a sea of icons. They also seem to have improved the performance of the add/remove programs. It no longer takes several minutes to find all the installed applications in order to list them for you.

What Else is New?

There are still many more features in Windows 7, besides the User Interface enhancements you have seen here, there is also new advances in Touch, speech and handwriting recognition.

Also new are support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, and improved boot performance.

Of course do not forget or under estimate Windows Media Center, it should prove to be even better on Windows 7 and it’s already something I use daily with fantastic results.

If you are interested in Windows 7, I do not hesitate to suggest you download it and give it a try. If you want to try it, hurry because there are only 2.5 million keys available and they will go fast. Download Windows 7.

I have been quite actively interjecting my own opinion in a thread on a website about Linux. I know, I know, don’t say anything if you can’t say something nice, but sometimes it’s just so much fun. There is actually quite a bit nice to say about Linux, I just happen to believe that it really belongs in the same place Unix does, on servers, maintained by really smart people who have good reason to use it. Ouch, maybe that’s a bit harsh, it is a cool desktop operating system… if you are pretty knowledgable to keep it running and do not mind the total lack of support from pretty much all major hardware and software vendors.

I wanted to repost a comment I made because I firmly believe it and think it brings to light a lot of the misconceptions of Linux. Kevin, a poster on this thread also believes, rightfully so of course, that his true reason for using Linux is the freedom, not the price or lack thereof. Kevin personally feels that he is shackled by proprietary tools. Now I am not sure if he would feel that he needed to be able to open up Photoshop, look under the hood and change and recompile it to fit his need (this seems pretty ridiculous to me) but he says:

You are all missing the point. What makes GNU/Linux great is that is is free software. Free as in freedom. What this means to the computer user is that you can make it do anything you want, without restriction. If you want to know how something works the documentation and the code is there for your perusal, unlike proprietary/closed os’s.

Whether Linux’s desktop market share grows or not is irrelevant. What matters is that it is free, and available to those of us that choose to free ourselves from the shackles of proprietary tools. And if you don’t think proprietary operating systems impose shackles on their users; next time a EULA pops up when you install something, actually take the time to read it. You’ll see just how restrictive most of them are.

How restrictive is Windows EULA (PDF Link) these days? It turns out the Windows Vista End User License Agreement is 14 pages. I will summarize these pages real quick so we can define these “shackles”

» Read the rest of this entry «

So here is the scenario. I have a crap load of computers. Any given day, it’s very likely that my grubby little hands touch three Windows Vista desktops, one Windows Vista laptop, a Windows XP laptop, two Mac desktops and a Mac laptop. I also carry a Windows Mobile phone. All in all that is 9 devices that I might use to create or consume files.

What Does It Do?

Upon logging into my Live Mesh account, I see a browser Window that looks something like this, well exactly like this:

The circle you see is all of the devices that I have connected to my Mesh network. (As you can see a few of my computers are not on my Mesh network) You can also see that a few of my devices, my laptops, are shown as unavailable.

Each device has different capabilities depending on the platform. The following table shows what you can do with Mesh depending on the system you are using:

So while the Remote Desktop feature works fantastic, right now it’s limited only to Windows XP and Vista, it does work very well over the web though and if those are the environments you use it’s a great feature.

The above image shows a Live Mesh folder through the web interface

 
The above image shows the same folder on a Windows Desktop.

The real bread and butter of Live Mesh is available on all platforms and that is file syncing. Let me give you a scenario that I cooked up to show you exactly what you could do with Live Mesh:

How Can It Be Used?

So I just moved to a new area and I am looking for a new house. Today I have a few houses to look at that I might be interested in. So while I am sitting home listening to music on Zune Pass (this is going to be an over-zealous Microsoft demo can you tell?) and locating the listings on-line, I am also entering the generic details like Address, # of bedrooms/baths, square footage, etc. into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet that I happen to be saving into a Mesh enabled folder on my computer.

I finish looking at the listings and hop in the car to check them out. Now, since the Mesh enabled folder on my Windows Vista desktop computer is synchronized to my Windows Mobile phone, I open up the spreadsheet I just created to type the first address into my GPS. That’s right, the file is already there and only enough time for me to walk to your car has elapsed. Not bad!

So now I am at the first location and I think it’s a great place but there are a few things that I want to talk to an inspector about as well as a few things I want to take photos of for my own information. I pop back out my Windows Mobile phone and snap five or ten photos to help job my memory later.

I repeat this pattern while looking at the next few houses until lunch when I stop at Starbucks for a tofu wheat flavorless but very trendy bagel and coffee for a working lunch (I really stopped at McDonalds, shhhh). I pop out my Macbook Pro (because you are in Starbucks after all, status quo yo!) and re-open my spreadsheet I have been using all morning and add a few notes and attach the photos that I took this morning, the same photos that have just finished syncing to my Macbook via Live Mesh, and resave the spreadsheet.

I continue my afternoon looking at more houses and go home and update the spreadsheet with the new information how I did earlier and this time I save it to my shared folder.

It just so happens I have an aunt who is a real estate agent and I decide I want her opinion on the houses that I am looking at, but we live very far apart and don’t have much time to catch up, so I resave my spreadsheet to a folder that I have created on Live Mesh for us to use and add her as a member to the folder. She goes to the web, logs in, opens the spreadsheet, adds her notes to my houses and photos and saves it back.

I look at her notes in my spreadsheet and start to make an informed decision.

Summary

Now consider this scenario for a second. Look what all was done with media on several different devices in different locations. No copying, thumb drive transporting, emailing, waiting. It’s all nearly instant. I can work how I want to work. Everything I need is available no matter where I am or which device I am using. That’s just the beginning of the power of the Windows Live Mesh network.

If you haven’t yet used it, go to www.mesh.com, set up your own account, and see Mesh for yourself. It’s an amazing technology.

So I decided to do a completely unbiased set of blogs on Google Search vs. Microsoft Live Search. It should be know that although I work for Microsoft, I pretty much use Google Search exclusively. Thinking about that today, I wondered why. This set of blogs is an attempt to answer that question, help me decide if I should switch, and of course, review the two for your reading pleasure.

I thought I really cared for Google’s Spartan approach, just the box ma’am, just the box. I compared the launch page and found Live Search’s search page to be very pleasant to look at and while still being basic in it’s functions. So what do we have besides the box? I’ll list them out and give you my best guess at percentage of how useful it is:

• Links to Live Search, MSN and Windows Live – 30% – I am already at Live Search, if I wanted MSN I would have just typed it, and while I love Windows Live products, that’s not what I came here for. If this is my default landing page and I use either of those services frequently, it’s nice to have a one click launch.
• News Link – 40% – This is same as the links at the top, but slightly more useful to me, I can get some news with one click if this is my browser’s launch page.
• Links to Country, Options, Cashback, Advanced and Sign In – 60% – Most of these are things I would use regularly, and when I don’t they aren’t obtrusive. Nice.
• Make Live Search Your Home Page – 90% – This works well and if you change it, it goes away. For those who want to change it, it’s easy and if you don’t it’s not blingy or annoying.
• The Search Box – 100% – One thing I do like about the Live box particularly, is I can change the search before I get a list. With Google, it’s no more clicks, I can search then click images instead of clicking images then searching. But something about seeing my options first is a little more “informational” just a preference.
• Bottom Links – 50% – A news splash, more bling for Windows Live Messenger and some admin links. I understand you have to have the latter, but the other two are not all that needed.

The bottom line is of the things I don’t find all that necessary, they don’t get in my way, so I don’t mind them so much. So what about Google?

• Links for all of the search types – 20% – just like Microsoft, but not at the search box, I think proximity adds to usability, just my opinion.
• Login links for my accounts @ Google – 80% – I do use Google a lot so these things are very handy.
• The Search Box – 90% – I can dig adding the Advanced, Language and Options beside the search box, again proximity is good, Microsoft Live Search did well with the search types, but the advanced and options are a bit too far away for my taste, nice one Google.
• Google Admin Links – 10% – Got to have them, at least they aren’t obtrusive or in the way.
• Add Homepage Link -  90% – Works as well as the Microsoft one, it adds then goes away.

It really is a wash and neither clearly wins, the real answer will come in the next blog, search results. I will do variety of queries and then compare the top 5 results. See you next time.

From So Long, Bill Gates, and Thanks for the Monopoly By Dylan Tweney

In fact, the monopoly that Microsoft once had on computer operating systems was essential to the development of the computer industry, enforcing a de facto standard that permitted thousands of software and hardware companies to blossom.

The Microsoft monopoly was one part luck, one part business acumen. The lucky part: When IBM asked Microsoft to provide an operating system for its new personal computer in 1980, Gates got the contract, even though he didn’t have an OS to sell.

No problem. Gates immediately bought the rights to another operating system, QDOS, which he then recast as MS-DOS and sold to IBM.

The savvy part: Gates’ fledgling company was able to retain rights to the new operating system, securing Microsoft’s place at the hub of the PC industry. Later, Gates leveraged that monopoly into such complete dominance of the PC industry that Microsoft was able to collect payments from PC manufacturers for every PC they sold — even if those PCs didn’t carry a Microsoft operating system.

That monopoly was bad for competitors who had arguably superior operating systems — including, later, IBM’s OS/2. And it was built in large part on appropriating the best ideas of other companies, from Gary Kildall’s CP/M to Apple’s Macintosh.

But the upside was enormous because the monopoly created a stable environment where entrepreneurs could develop new companies and new products around a common platform.

Without that standard, the computer industry in the 1990s would have resembled the web today: diverse, vibrant and flowering with abundant innovation, but also frequently broken because of the inability of disparate products to make the most basic connections with one another.

"Unlike oil, pharmaceutical or steel, monopolies are a necessary ingredient in the technology business," Forrester Research founder George Colony wrote in a recent blog post. "It’s only when de facto standards like Windows or de jure standards like HTML become dominant that usefulness soars."

Contrast that to the state of the internet today. While the web abounds in standards, a frequent problem is that companies don’t hew to them (and since 1996, Microsoft has been guilty of this behavior too). Having trouble syncing your Google calendar with your Yahoo calendar? Wondering why your camcorder won’t upload to your new Macbook, your iPod can’t share files with your friends’ MP3 players and your mobile phone can’t display webpages properly? All of these problems are traceable to a lack of widely supported standards.

Just imagine if the same chaos had reigned throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Hardware manufacturers like Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq and IBM would still be battling it out with incompatible systems. And software like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and yes, even Microsoft Office never would have achieved widespread success.

"[Bill Gates] made an unbelievable contribution," said Netscape, Opsware and Ning founder Marc Andreessen, while speaking at a keynote with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year. "It’s hard to conceive what this industry would look like today if Microsoft hadn’t standardized the OS … I think the industry would be much smaller if that hadn’t happened."

Of course, success breeds resentment, and Gates’ aggressive business practices — and less-than-polished personal style — made him many enemies.

"The problem is when you’re the biggest sequoia in the woods, everyone wants to cut you down," said Paul Santinelli, a general partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, a venture capital firm.

Gates didn’t help matters by overreaching once his company’s monopoly was firmly established.

"Gates became kind of a Godfather figure in the industry, demanding tributes from his partners and whacking those who threatened his power," Carr said. "So Microsoft deserves both praise for stimulating innovation and criticism for stifling it."

And then there was the problem that many of Microsoft’s products simply didn’t work that well. Indeed, as the chorus of complaints about Windows Vista grows louder day by day, it could be said that Gates is leaving Microsoft at exactly the right time, before the company’s long decline sullies his reputation.

"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we’d all be out of a job," said David Strom, an independent technology consultant and speaker in St. Louis, Missouri. Strom has a speech praising Gates for, among other things, effectively guaranteeing full employment for IT people called in to make Microsoft products work properly.

But while technologists may curse Gates’ aggressiveness and the bugginess of Microsoft software, they should also raise a glass to toast him as he departs the computer business.

"He didn’t have the zest of a Philippe Kahn, or the elegance of a Steve Jobs, or the stage presence of a Larry Ellison. But the guy revolutionized the PC industry, and that’s what people need to remember," said Santinelli.