As of today both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are available to everyone and everywhere (with obvious international limitations where MS are not allowed to sell). For example, Harvey Norman is a chain of stores that sell furniture and electronics in Ireland. Yesterday I got an A3 sized glossy flyer through the door advertising Windows 7 and pre-loaded OEM PC’s being on sale from today onwards.
I think MS learned a lot from the Vista days. You even hear them publicly admitting that mistakes were made with Vista. Personally I think they communicated badly. It appeared to me back then that they were pitching Vista at the home user. All I heard for the most part was how pretty it was and how easy it was to burn photos to a DVD. Who cares!?!?! The business generally wants to disable DVD burning. MS failed to market the business functionality of Vista. I think they failed very badly at working with the OEM’s. PC’s were sold as “Vista Capable” that barely ran the OS. Lots of existing hardware had no drivers. I’d just bought a set of wifi cards before the Vista release that had no support.
Windows 7 has been very different.
Locally, we saw a huge effort by MS. In the Spring we had the TechDays tour which I spoke at. At night Wilbour Craddock did a session on IT at home. I worked with a number of other speakers in the day events to talk about Windows 7 working “better together” with Windows Server 2008 R2 and many of the new features. In the summer MS ran a series of Windows 7 only events around the island. We’ve just wrapped up the community launch tour. Again Will did the IT at home session. In the day we ran a session featuring some of the developers. Myself, Will and Dave Northey talked about Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. I focused on MAP (Assessment and Planning), application compatibility (ACT and XP Mode), and deployment (WDS but mainly MDT 2010). There was even a special all day deployment event in Ennis.
Heck, MS Ireland are even going to have representatives in selected retail outlets today to talk about Windows 7. They are taking it very seriously.
Corporate also did a better job communicating with home and professional customers starting back in November 2008. The beta and RC programs were HUGE. We saw the result of that at the launch events: over 75% of attendees were already using Windows 7. There’s a genuine appetite for it and interest in it.
On the driver side I’ve experienced some happiness. Those wifi NIC’s that sat unused have a driver supplied in the Windows 7 DVD. I’ve heard similar stories from others. MS really did work with the OEM’s. Certain rootkit spreading OEM’s (you know who I mean) continue to be uncooperative, though, when it comes to XP Mode/Windows Virtual PC support.
The Windows User Group will continue this work. I’m planning a deployment session that will be demo, demo, demo. I want to do everything from scratch so people see how to use WAIK, WDS and MDT for themselves.
I’m going into a retail outlet today. I’m feeling evil and want to have some fun 🙂