Alec Saunders SquawkBox

At 6:00 AM yesterday morning I started downloading the Windows 7 x64 release. By 9:30 AM I was installing it.  Yes, I admit it, I’m a keener. I’ve used every Windows beta since Windows 3.1 in 1992, and I still find it a thrill to be on the bleeding edge of new technologies.  I also grabbed the x86 version, just in case, before Microsoft closes off the downloads (now extended to January 24th). 

My first impressions of Windows 7 are pretty positive. 

I installed the software in a separate disk partition on a desktop PC at my home.  This PC is an Acer M5620 desktop with the Intel Q6600 Core2 Quad processor, four gigabytes of memory, 500G SATA hard disk and a dual-head ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics card.  The Windows 7 installer is nearly identical to the Windows Vista installer, which means that the process is pretty painless.  You can start it, and go have coffee or a run, which is what I did.

The installation missed a few key drivers. 

• It failed to detect my HP Color Laserjet CLJ1600 printer. The Windows Vista x64 driver for the CLJ1600 worked just fine, however.
• It had no drivers for the Intel ICH9 family of host controllers, which meant that the system management bus had no driver whatsoever.  Sevenforums.com, however, had a link to a full set of Intel SM bus drivers for Windows 7. 
• It misidentified my Samson C01-U condenser microphone as an “other” device.  Interestingly, although Skype can see the C01-U as a microphone, Windows 7 provides no volume input controls for it. 

Beta performance is really no better than Windows Vista, and perhaps a little worse. However, this is beta code.  Microsoft has a history of delaying optimization of the code until just before release. 

• Windows Experience Index score under Windows Vista is 5.1 for this hardware, but just 2.9 under Windows 7.  The offending score is hard disk performance.  I assume that Windows 7 is simply missing an optimized version of a low level system driver such as a bus driver or hard disk controller.
• Boot times were noticeably poorer under Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista, despite Microsoft’s claims to have optimized this aspect of the experience.  I timed both Windows 7 and Vista from the point of pressing the enter key at the dual-boot screen to the login screen, and from the entry of a password into the login screen to the point that the Start button became active.  Windows 7 scored 52 seconds from cold start to the login screen, and 17 seconds from the login screen to the start button active.  On Vista, however, the times were 34 seconds and 12 seconds. 

Visually, Windows 7 is very similar to Vista, with some small improvements.  For example:

• The task bar and system tray have been optimized.  Gone are the text labels in the task bar. Each icon on the bar represents a single application, and if an application has multiple tabs, the pop-up preview for that application shows all the tabs. Right clicking on the icon produces a “jump list” which has all of the recently accessed documents for that application.  Support for these features must be implemented by the application, which means that few of the applications you use on a day to day basis will benefit immediately.

Display tabs opened in IE 8

Jump list for the file manager.

• The system tray now has a small pop-up so that all of the items that run as background processes, but aren’t required day to day, can be hidden on a menu out of site.  An on the right side of the system tray, beside the clock, is a small vertical bar that can be used to minimize all windows, or if you hover the mouse pointer over it, it will turn the Windows transparent so the desktop itself is visible.

System tray with pop-up.

• And why would you want to make the Windows transparent?  To see your gadgets.  Gone is the Windows Vista sidebar.  Now gadgets can be installed anywhere on the screen in their minimized or maximized forms.
• Windows that are opened now have some new behaviours.  When you drag a window to the left or right, eventually it will snap to the side, consuming exactly 50% of the desktop.  If you drag it up to the top of the screen it will maximize.  Dragging it down will make it minimize.  If those new behaviours seem superfluous, it’s probably because you’re still using a mouse.  Windows 7 includes support for touch screens, and these new Window gestures are clearly targeted at the finger-pointing crowd. 

There are lots of other small changes throughout.  Suffice it to say, if you’re a Windows Vista user, Windows 7 isn’t going to feel like a radical change.  Rather, it will seem to be a logical and useful refinement. 

Software compatibility seems to be quite good.  I installed Office 2007, Windows Live Sync, Live Mesh, Skype, Tweetdeck (plus Adobe Air), iTunes, Safari, and Firefox and experienced no problems.  The major problems I encountered were:

• Google Chrome (my preferred browser these days) just flat out doesn’t work.  Windows 7 warns of compatibility problems, and indeed there are.  Chrome doesn’t display any web pages, at all.  Period.
• Browsing to Google Analytics with the IE 8 beta included in Windows 7 caused IE 8 to crash.  The black bar in the image below is IE 8’s attempt to render the performance graph.  The same page was easily rendered in Firefox and Safari however.

IE 8 failure to render Google Analytics page.

• In general, IE 8 beta has intermittent compatibility problems with web sites under Windows 7.  For example, it renders several of the pages in our own Calliflower conference call service incorrectly.  Users of Windows 7 will want to use IE 8 as the primary browser in order to use the tabbed display of open sites in the task bar, but have a backup like Firefox or Safari (but unfortunately not Chrome).

Some of the built-in Windows applets and features also get updates.  For example:

• Paint now sports a ribbon interface reminiscent of Office 2007.  This is a welcome update.  Paint hasn’t fundamentally changed since Windows 3.1.
• The printers window has now been rechristened as the “Device Deck” and shows all of the devices attached to the computer. 
• Windows Media Center has an updated look and feel as well, with an apparently more internet-centric focus. 

There are some new applets as well:

• A handy snip tool that lets you quickly capture images from the screen.  This is way more convenient that shift-print-screen, paste into paint, followed by select / copy, which is the way most people do this.
• A handy ISO burner.  If you download an ISO file (for example, the Windows 7 beta DVD!) you can now burn it directly to media without needing to buy a copy of Nero or some other DVD burning tool.
• A sticky note tool that lets you tack notes to yourself on the screen.  Again, way handier than opening notepad, which is what I do now.

Power management improvements seem to be on the way with Windows 7 also.  Although the Acer has the hardware to support sleep states, Windows Vista never supported it well.  I would regularly find the PC hung over night and need to reboot it in the morning, unable to return it from the sleep state. I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find that Windows 7 has no such problems.

Security is also apparently a focus.  The new “Action Center” consolidates UI for security and trouble shooting into one system tray icon.  When clicked it produces a window enumerating all of the fixes and issues that it has found. 

Note that Microsoft is working with Kaspersky, AVG, and Norton to provide anti-virus support for Windows 7 users.

So should you install Windows 7 beta?  If you’re a savvy PC user, comfortable with searching for drivers that may not be in the current release, and don’t mind dealing with a few small bugs, by all means.  It’s stable, compatible with the software that most people use on a day to day basis, and provides some nice enhancements to the Windows Vista experience.  Do, however, install it in a separate partition if you can.  Don’t start off by upgrading a Vista PC.  And back-up before you do anything. 

There’s a small history lession in all this.  If you can remember back to the dark ages of the PC industry, in 1990 Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0.  A technically ambitious product for its time, it was the first version of Windows to incorporate protected mode memory management.  Needless to say, it wasn’t perfect.  Not until Windows 3.1 – the “dot” release — shipped in the spring of 1992 were the complaints about 3.0 were finally put to bed.  Windows 3.1 introduced some minor user interface changes, but fundamentally it was the release that fixed the Windows 3.0 problems. 

Sound familiar? 

Based on what I’ve seen in the last 24 hours, when Windows 7 eventually ships it should put to bed the complaints about Windows Vista once and for all. Windows 7 is the “dot” release to Windows Vista.

Guest Host: Dan York

Out at DEMO in San Diego, Alec saw a demo from MessageSling. Today we had one of the founders, Scot Junkin, on the call to talk about what they are doing with making messaging easier.  They are also doing some interesting things from an architecture point of view with running Asterisk and FreeSWITCH servers up on Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

Next – yesterday, Sept 9th, Apple had their “Let’s Rock” keynote where Steve Jobs introduced iTunes 8.0, a new form factor for the iPod Nano, new release of the iPod Touch (including a direct challenge for it to be a game controller), their new “Genius” playlist creation tool and much more.

We’ll talk about this latest buzz from Cupertino – what do you all think of it? what stood out the most from the announcements? Can Apple try to push this “Genius” thing any harder? Initial impressions of iTunes 8.0?

We also talked about the case recently where Google News pulled up an item from 2002 about United Airlines entering bankruptcy and posted that as new news, causing United’s stock to drop by 11%! Does this speak to larger issues about our reliance on automated results?

We ended with a discussion of RIM’s announcement of a Blackberry flip phone.

On the conference call: Dan York, James Swinger, Hudson Barton, Martyn Davies, Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Jeanette Fisher, Jeb Brillian, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Sheryl Breuker, Saleem Khan and Scot Junkins.

 

 Squawk Box - Sept 10, 2008 - MessageSling, Apple's announcements and Google News tanking United's stocks [44:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

On the SquawkBox conference call this morning we discussed the rumours of an iTunes unlimited offering.  The folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog published a piece this morning suggesting that Apple might offer (for perhaps $130 year) a subscription “all-you-can-eat” iphone music service, with the option to buy tracks you’d really like to keep. It’s an intriguing idea, especially in the context of the conversation we had yesterday around piracy.  At the same time, it seems like there might be some overlap with Satellite Radio, for example.

Consensus on the call: some form of cloud based music subscription / storage makes a ton of sense.  Whether it’s Apple’s route, or a service like Pandora, it seems to be the future.

And second, there are a ton of blog postings hitting this morning about Blackberry Bold. The launch is imminent.  We’ve got a number of Blackberry users as regulars. So we had a discussion about Citigroup’s report that Bold is strong but not a game changer, the 3G issues being reported and RIM’s development platforms.

Most tellingly, it was difficult to keep the conversation focused on Blackberry.  Our callers are clearly more excited about iPhone.

The most quotable quote of the call came from Bill Volk in relation to Sun Microsystems stewardship of the J2ME platform: “Sun has done the worst possible technical job possible with J2ME”.

On the conference call this morning: Dan Rockwell, Thomas Purves, Dan York, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Todd Spraggins, Sheryl Breuker, Frank Abrams.

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 Squawk Box August 21 [34:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Apple is driving me nuts. 

Over the last few days, they've been pushing out an update titled "iTunes + QuickTime" via the Apple Software Updater.  I don't use iTunes, and it's not installed on my PC.  But I DO use QuickTime.  In fact, I have paid for QuickTime Pro.  But Apple hasn't provided me with the ability to simply install the QuickTime piece of this update. 

It appears to be a cheap stunt designed to put iTunes on my PC.  Someone in product management should review this decision. 

You hafta love Ted Wallingford.  Smart guy, insightful commentary, and occasionally he just “hits one out of the park” with some particularly good observations.  In this case, his call for Steve Jobs to turn iTunes into the YouTube of music is brilliant.  In fact, it may be the smartest thing that Jobs could do, given that YouTube is already becoming… the YouTube of music.  Every day you find more and more clips from up and comers and musical wannabe’s finding their way onto YouTube.  How long before the labels, and hence iTunes, become irrelevant?

Ted’s proposal is just the sort of inspired lunacy, the zig to Microsoft’s DRM zag, that Apple ought to embrace.  Let people upload their own music and share the profits from downloads with them.  iTunes has more market power than you think, Steve.  What would happen if iTunes became the indy “label” of choice?