Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Microsoft is working on Windows 7.  I’m sure eventually it will be given a pleasingly generic name, like Windows Tide, Windows Effevra, or Windows Valium. On second thought, they’ll probably ditch anything starting with the letter “V”, if for no other reason than to avoid conjuring images of their present operating system disaster.

The Ars Technica sneak preview can be found here. Apparently the taskbar has been radically altered for the first time in thirteen years. Gone are the text descriptions of buttons. In their place, there are large, shiny icons that can be rearranged at will. That all sounds oddly familiar, but hey, it was about time.

Microsoft is also introducing “jump lists,” so that when you right-click a program’s icon, you get a giant list of things, because if there’s one thing a user loves, it’s a giant list. Speaking of which, I can’t believe I ever used one of these to organize all the content on my computer. I was positively fastidious about my Start Menu, and the thing was still a convoluted, hierarchical mess that sat mostly unused. Of all the changes that are on the whiteboard for Windows 7, the one at the top should be “Destroy the Start Menu.” The type and amount of content on a person’s computer is no longer adequately served by this metaphor. Get rid of it, and concentrate on copying Spotlight, a tool so useful that it’s now become an automatic action for me. I don’t know how I ever lived without it.

On the bright side, Microsoft has implemented a way to “peek” at a window by making all others transparent. This is a small but genuine improvement. Also, widgets gadgets have finally moved out of that cramped sidebar and are available on the desktop. I honestly wish that this was how Apple did it. Oh, and the system tray is now “under user control,” which hopefully means that it won’t be packed with a dozen useless supplementary program icons. There was a time when I would have thought that this represented a huge usability improvement, but for over a year I’ve been using an operating system where the maligned system tray simply does not exist. The nearest equivalent is the upper-right corner of the menu bar, and that’s never felt like a junkyard.

Other than that, there’s nothing exciting to report. Granted, this is a work in progress and it’s all very likely to change (after a multi-year delay, of course), so I’m not passing any kind of final judgment yet. To do otherwise would be a sign of zealotry, and I am no zealot. I would, however, like to mention something.

Apple is notorious for keeping its projects under Kremlin-like curtain of secrecy. Whatever the project is, the public doesn’t get to know word one about it until it’s ready for release, and by “ready for release,” I mean “perfect”. Hey, is Apple planning to transition to Intel chips? No comment. Well, wouldn’t that require an Intel-compatible version of OS X? Well yeah, but no comment. No comment. No comment. This rumor floated around for years without so much as a syllable of confirmation, and then one day, boom. Surprise! We’re moving to Intel chips and and an entire infrastructure has already been put into place to accommodate this massive transition. Please begin ordering your new laptops from our online store.

On the other hand, Microsoft simply cannot wait to tell you what it’s working on. Are there plans for a new music player? Are there plans for a Vista replacement? Microsoft is only too happy to tell you what the plans are, and how they will bring about a Utopian future for all of us. What Microsoft has never understood—and I have no idea why they have so much trouble with this—is that we are not interested in plans. We want the reality. We want to know what we can buy today. Giving me a sneak preview only forces me to expect more from you by extrapolating from your reality to my fantasies. Don’t promise me ten great things and then deliver five, as you did with Vista. It also leads to embarrassment on your part, doesn’t it, Microsoft? Yeah, I’ll bet you wanted that multi-touch demo to run perfectly. Perhaps you should have waited until the kinks were ironed out. I don’t know. I’m not paid millions of dollars, I’m just sort of thinking out loud here.

During the 1997 Macworld keynote address, the one that represented Steve Jobs’s return to Apple, he said, “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job.” Microsoft must now do the same. Stop crapping all over Apple, because that will get you nowhere. Be better. Make better products, and don’t show them to me until they are perfect. Lord knows you guys have the money and resources to make it happen, so ask yourselves, why hasn’t it?