Windows 7 is here, but with years of bad Vista memories, does it have what it takes?  Depending on how Windows 7 embraces new-age technologies such as cloud-computing and netbooks, it will determine whether Windows 7 is the future, or more of the same from an antiquated software giant.

Microsoft has vowed to make Windows 7 as user friendly and interoperable as possible- something that attributed to the early downfall of Vista.  Unlike its predecessor, Windows 7 is intended to be an incremental upgrade to Vista, with the goal of being fully compatible with device drivers, applications, and hardware in which Vista is already compatible with.  Similarly, users that skipped the Vista upgrade altogether to stick with XP should have no compatibility issues when migrating to Windows 7.  That is, if everything goes as smoothly as Microsoft has intimated.

In terms of embracing future technologies, it will come down to the OS’s effectiveness to run on sub-notebooks and netbooks, as well as the effective use of “cloud-based” environments- both of which are primary computing technologies that are rising in popularity exponentially, and will continue to do so for years to come.  In terms of being suitable for netbooks and the likes, Windows 7 has made huge strides to get the OS, as a whole, smaller in size to better operate on low-processing-power computers.  Instead of packaging useless applications such as Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail and Windows Movie Maker into Windows 7, they’ve been left out to minimize the load on your system.  You can instead download these and other free applications directly from Microsoft on an as-needed basis.  Operating systems will need to get smaller in size and use less resources in the near future, and this is an area Windows 7 has done well.

The aforementioned improvements will also better position Windows 7 for cloud computing, but Microsoft’s notorious complexity will likely put Windows 7 behind other OSs that offer much better overall simplicity.  For example, Windows 7 will be available in several forms as always, with one being suited primarily for cloud computing.  In addition, Microsoft will launch what they call “Windows Cloud” which will be nothing more than a Windows-based environment for developers to create and launch cloud-based applications.  While it’s an improvement, it’s still complicated.

Overall, I think Windows 7 will do alright simply due to the fact that it’s a Windows product.  But, in the long-run Microsoft has simply waited to long and let the rest of the industry nearly pass them right by.  Companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Google and others have already been perfecting their cloud-based offerings for years, while Microsoft has just been making its user angry.

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