Saber Toothed Bunny Rabbit
It appears that MegaHard has had an attack, or given the size of the organization, more of an epidemic, of reality. I read in an on-line eWeek article [Link] that MegaHard is cutting its losses with Vista and is beginning to exude nerd-foreplay-talk of Windows 7.
My immediate thought here is that MegaHard appears to be returning to a practice of numbering OS editions. This served them in fair stead in past up thought NT. Certainly XP was not an absolute disaster although it is definitely lacking in usability when compared to the earlier 2000. In this case the excursion to yearage, akin to how they designate Office disaster events, may be partly excused, especially considering the excitement over the millennium. It is even touching that they, like so many, got the year wrong.
But the substantive derivative thoughts have to do with what MegaHard is going to have to accomplish here. Obviously, this is not a new phenomena for MegaHard. Recall the debacle of ME. But the bar has been raised considerably here and it is not at all clear that MegaHard has the energy to leap that bar.
Quite obviously, W7 is going to have some rather strenuous and real requirements. It is going to have to be at least as fast as XP, and run on XP hardware. It is going to have to have real security aspects, not the Potempkinisms of VISTA. It is going to have to accommodate both Open Source and Virtualization advances that are going to overtake its delivery. This means that W7 is going to have to be a much more open OS than recent versions of Windows, accommodating more than just MegaHard and minions’ software. And MegaHard is also going to have to abandon its vision that the only thing running in virtual machines on Windows is more Windows. Why, they may even have to accommodate the idea of Windows in a virtual box on Linux.
So we shall see how much of this MegaHard can deliver, because failure to carry through on this will not be a pleasant option. MegaHard can also be a General Motors.
