Microsoft Windows 7’s Warm Release an Advent to the Shared Computing Space
Windows is doing well, it would seem:
Just six months after its release, Windows 7 is now installed on one in 10 of the world’s PCs, Microsoft has confirmed.
The operating system was launched on 22 October 2009 and has gone on to sell more than 100 million licences – making it the fastest-selling Windows OS in history according to Microsoft.
Microsoft yesterday reported revenues of $14.5bn for the financial quarter ended 31 March and CFO Peter Klein said Windows 7 "continues to be a growth engine" – with Windows revenue up 28 per cent year-on-year.
For all the bluster and hate directed at Microsoft’s various marketing campaigns surrounding Windows, it continues to see adoption and warm reception, both from the enterprise and the consumer.
Speaking personally, I was never a fan of Vista. Certainly, when you look at features and UI, there isn’t too much different between Windows 7 and Windows Vista – but the fact that I’m able to have Windows 7 run (and run well!) on machines that Vista would slow to an unusable crawl is enough to make me a fan. More importantly, reading between the lines, Windows 7 doing well means that Microsoft is well on it’s way to creating the “shared family computing space” it seems to have been inching towards recently.
The concept hasn’t been acknowledged publicly (to the best of my knowledge) other than brief nods in various mass media commercials.
The “Steven’s HomeGroup” commercial, I think, really highlights the power of what Microsoft seems to be striving for in their evolution of the company. People (I remember Robert Scoble talking about this in Austin this year) talk about this magical far future situation where you’re able to take a video from your iPad and drag it to the family TV and watch it, or interact with a game from the TV on some other mobile type of device. Somehow, whenever this is talked about, Apple is always the provider of this technology.
What many pundits fail to realize is that future is already here, to a certain extent, and it’s all powered by Microsoft. Food for though, really.
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