7 is Vista, 7 is the Mojave Experiment.

What? Yeah. Damn straight. 7 is just Vista. That might seem like an odd thing to say from someone regularly lambasted for being pro-MS. But it’s ultimately true; Vista was a revolutionarily different leap over XP’s relative simplicity and middle-ages approach to design, resourcing and use in general. 7, by contrast to Vista, and by contrast to Vista’s contrast to XP (that’s a hell of a lot of contrast), is merely evolutionary. Is this a bad thing? No. Vista was an absolutely great design architecturally, and from a security standpoint, and didn’t need anything radical doing to it. A spot of polish, a bit more time to add originally planned features, a bit of visual tweaking; that’s all it ever needed – there was not, and is not, anything wrong with Vista’s core design.

With that in mind, 7 is what Vista needs in more ways than one. At its heart, 7 is Vista; it’s kernel revision isn’t 7.0, but 6.1 (Vista was 6.0, Server 2003/XP Pro x64 was 5.2, XP Home/Pro was 5.1, 2000 was 5.0 etc). While the build versions are 7xxx, it’s kernel, the very core of the operating system, is a minor revision over Vista. This means that indeed, 7 really is a slightly different version of Vista.

But why should this be a bad thing? Vista has many names, resparked the ‘M$’ moniker, and was generally badly received by the media, and in my opinion, was the first time something had been communally target by the ‘blogosphere’.

I loathe the word, but it’s appropriate. The blogosphere is essentially a snowball of opinions with little else behind it. Vista received a massive stigma, because it was released to a world where everybody had an opinion, informed or otherwise, experienced or otherwise, or even had used the operating system. One person with a dislike to change and an xp4lyfe attitude makes some remarks about what is wrong with Vista (correct or otherwise), and these are echoed as fact by a thousand others, and then you have a fission reaction of posts, comments, which snowballs  (fission and snowballs, odd mix) that then boil over to mainstream media, and inevitably form what makes up the sheep like public opinion.

And so it was; Vista was ‘bad’, a ‘downgrade’, ‘ME2′, and so on. It was a bad and rubbish operating system that ran slowly and represented a regression. This is of course, irrespective of the massive talent of the company that produced it, the $6 billion spent on its development, or the fact that it was, and is, an outstanding operating system, and incredibly secure.

My girlfriend (and this entirely anecdotal without source) in one of her event management textbooks had something regarding first impressions; the numbers on this may be slightly off, but the core point remains the same.

• first impressions are formed within seven seconds, and imprinted and exceedingly difficult to change within thirty seconds

And there you have it. Public opinion was formed on the back of other opinion. If the first thing you hear about something is that it is bad, and everybody around you is saying the same thing, you would certainly be excused for following the flow of things. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but it’s understandable.

Vista was released in November 2006. Despite how apparently awful it was, it sold very well, and did great for Microsoft. But it did, and still has (a slowly receding) stigma of hate behind it. In July 2008, Microsoft launched an extremely interesting, if scientifically dubious, social experiment; the Mojave Experiment.

Essentially, all the Mojave Experiment was trying to prove was that Vista’s reputation was unfairly tarred by people who had no idea. Public opinions were taken by people of what they thought about Vista. They gave a rating of Vista from 0-10, with Vista scoring 4.4 out of a possible 10. Following this, the participants were hand-held through a demonstration of ‘Mojave’, purportedly Microsoft’s next operating system, following the ‘failure’ of Vista. Mojave was again rated by the participants by the same scale, receiving a score of 8.5 out of 10.

But the white rabbit in the hat that was Mojave, is that it was just Vista. It wasn’t a new operating system, it wasn’t anything new, it was Windows Vista. The Mojave Experiment, whilst scientifically dubious and criticised of having deliberately chosen their results, made an outstandingly good point.

Public opinion was…wrong. Very wrong.

Windows 7 is now approaching RTM, and shortly after that, will become available for retail purchase, and will begin appearing on consumer’s computers. Microsoft chose to keep the public codename of ’7′ as the operating system’s release name. It was codenamed by Blackcomb and Vienna, as a result of it’s predecessor, Vista’s, odd split development path. Before it’s name was released, it was just called 7 by people, owing to it being the next version of Windows (with Vista being NT6.0). Microsoft chose to keep its name as 7, and it will shortly be on shelves with ’7′ on the box.

Microsoft have had some interesting names over the years; Vista, XP (eXPerience), ME (Millennium Edition), but prior to these, versions of the operating system on the NT kernel (as apposed to the long deprecated and unused 9x kennel) were termed by number; NT4.0, 3.51, going further back, Windows 3.1, ultimately, Windows 1.0.

But more importantly, 7 entirely disassociates with the name ‘Vista’. And visually, with the Superbar, it’s a fair bit different. In fact, there’s enough subtle changes that make it not seem like Vista.

Windows 7 is Vista. But visually, and as far as public opinion, the consumer, and anyone is concerned, it’s not; it’s miles better, it’s completely different. In essence then, being that it’s the same thing, but given a new name to emerge from its stigma…Windows 7 is really the Mojave Experiment taken a step further.

And it works. It’s not even out yet, and people seem to love Windows 7. Is it sly and wrong? No, it’s great, and it’s an excellent piece of marketing, for which I entirely applaud Microsoft.

In case you are one of the Vista haters, and you see this through your haze as yet another Vista is bad, or ‘yet another nail in the coffin’ (it’s remarkable how overused that term was), or worse yet, as a reason why 7 is bad, you’re taking away entirely wrong point. 7 isn’t bad because it’s Vista, which was bad; 7 is good, Vista was good, there was never anything wrong at all. Baaaaaa.