Here’s a question for you.
Have you at any time over the past few years, gone out and bought a nice shiny flat screen?
If the answer is yes, Microsoft have something to say to you – in a year, it’s going to be obsolete.
Of course, if you have an old CRT screen that’s going to be obsolete too, but many people consider them already obsolete, so that’s not news. But the thing is, the brand new Windows 7 features tactile screen input, so that your kids can get your new flat screen utterly filthy with grubby paws, resizing windows by touch and moving stuff around the screen by touch without using a mouse. And much like Aero in Windows Vista, if your machine hasn’t got the specs, you miss out on the better aspects of the new interface.
Really they’ve made Windows do all it’s possible for a GUI to do on a standalone machine, and until the consumers doubts about privacy issues related to storing their data on someone elses server are settled, “cloud” computing isn’t really going to take off. Windows 7 is really somewhat redundant already, just as Windows Vista added very little functionality over what Windows XP was capable of. Sure, Vista made some things easier, but there’s very little it can actually do that you can’t make XP do in some form. Quite what the selling point to Windows 7 will be this early after the fiasco of trying to push DRM-filled Vista on an unwelcoming public remains to be seen.