Is "Windows 7" really "Windows Vista 2.0"?
User experience was so poor with Windows Vista that Microsoft wanted to distance itself from the product, but it’s unlikely that they just came up with a whole new product a few months later in response. What’s underneath in Windows 7, it it the same Vista core with the irritants removed and a freshened user interface? Or is it actually a dramatically different product?
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I think it’s different. My dad has Vista, and after a while he changed it to XP because we all agreed it was bad and confusing. I have Windows 7, and I think it’s different because it’s faster, or seems that way, and easier to use, and find files. More tools too.
If you’re asking if it’s a complete re-write of the code from the ground up, no, it’s not. Much of the current code can trace its roots back to Windows NT.
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Mostly, Windows 7 offers evolutionary performance, bug, usability, and security improvements over Windows Vista. Microsoft could have just as easily referred to the release as Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista.
The main thing to note was that Vista was so widely panned by critics and the market, that the marketing department did the only thing they could: gin up a completely new brand identity to get away from the chrome-plated turd that was Vista.
An increasingly sad phenomena in the software industry, large software packages are frequently getting rushed to market before they should be labeled “1.0”. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been from day one.
I asked a question back in May if the changes made from Vista to 7 could have been released as a service pack, but if Microsoft opted to make it a completely new OS to shed the negativity.
Windows 7 is a lot more like Vista than it is like XP. You have the same hinky file structure and other barriers to usability, but it’s a lot more stable and less annoying for typical users.
Not quite. It would be more accurate to say that Vista was Windows 7 v0.5 Beta.
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Yes, it’s the same.
(employed as a systems administrator)
@squirbel I disagree, but it may be a matter of semantics. Define “same”. I’ve seen a lot happen in the computer world in the 30+ years I’ve been doing computers, so whether Vista is/isn’t the same as Win7 really depends on your definition of “same”. It definitely isn’t the same as XP, and even further removed from the DOS-based Windows (as opposed to NT-based Windows, like XP) or any *NIX-oid OS, but the relationship between Vista and 7 is a little odd.
I see quite a few differences between the two. Macroshaft started to make 7, and partway through the development process, they released what they had so far as Vista (something they later admitted was a mistake). So it is the same, but it isn’t the same, if that makes sense.
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