Windows 7: Officially Dead This Week

With no funeral, retrospectives, accolades, or notes of sadness, the Windows 7 era has come to an end.

As noted by Network World, Microsoft will stop selling Windows 7 licenses to PC makers this Friday. So no more new PCs with Windows 7, with the exception of existing inventory. Windows 7 Professional will remain on sale as a standalone product for a very limited time.

What does this mean for the vast number of Windows users? Apparently, not much. New machines are equipped with Windows 8 andWindows 10 is just around the corner. We can now see Windows 7 for what it was: a placeholder designed to assuage the hordes of critics who did not like Vista.

In my office, I have three machines. A Vista machine (which I'm writing on), a Windows 7 machine mostly used for podcasting, and a Windows 8.1 machine being primed to replace the reliable Vista machine. There is also a Windows 8.1 laptop. Of all the machines, the Windows 7 machine, insofar as the OS is concerned, is the least impressive.

Windows 7 refuses to talk to the other machines on the network. It won't talk to one of the Epson printers and new drivers cannot make it work. It turns its nose up at the old Network Attached Storage (NAS) device I use. There were some patches that allowed it to see the NAS for a while, then it crapped out and the connection never worked again.

Windows 7 showed up in the market to "save" Microsoft after the company failed to market the feature-heavy Vista properly and the public soured on it. After all these years, I can accurately conclude that Vista was head and shoulders above Windows 7.

Windows 7 was a defensive OS designed to pare down Vista and clean it up to make it more presentable. In the process, it felt more like XP than Vista.

The things it could not do were too numerous, but because the hatred of Vista was so extreme nobody wanted to whine about Windows 7 lest they look like complainers. If you have not noticed, there has been a trend towards passivity amongst the tech media. They've given up. Complaining does not really work. Fixes make things worse. Windows 7 was the best example of this.

Thus we have no retrospectives for Windows 7, nothing. It's kind of the way it was with a lot of other Microsoft dogs. Bob, the graphical cartoon-like OS, is not even allowed in the official Microsoft timeline. Who knows when it was discontinued?Front Page, a world-beater of a Web development platform (largely ruined by Microsoft) ended with no fanfare. There are plenty of examples, but they generally are not key operating systems. Even Windows ME never seemed like anything serious and it definitely wasn't released to fix anything.

Windows 10 appears to be a little like an OS designed to fix Windows 8.1, an OS which did get a lot of complaints (perhaps grudgingly). Most of the complainers, like myself, found workarounds that made the OS fine. In my case it was Classic Shell.

I use Classic Shell because there are certain characteristics of Windows that are commonplace—that make it Windows. When I first saw Vista I knew there would be problems because someone did more than gussy up the look of the product and add powerful behind-the-scenes features. They messed up the user interface. The first time I was on a Vista machine hooked to a Wi-Fi network it took me forever to figure out how to find the network and then change it. This was not difficult with XP; it was simple. Why make it difficult? Why change the process? Why change anything that has to do with program control? Was it just for the sake of change?

This sort of change for change's sake re-appeared with Windows 8. I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me the rationale for full-screen applications. If you want to grow the page to full screen that was always possible. Most often you did not want that. You want to move Windows around. So why make an application full-screen only? What is the point? It's retro (hello DOS!). It's inconvenient. It's ugly. It's incredibly stupid looking on a 27-inch (or larger) monitor. Who exactly at Microsoft thought this was a good idea? Who approved this good idea? And who signed off on it?

We will never get an answer to these questions.

It was this sort of arrogance that previously brought down Vista. Let's change things for no good reason. The end result was a fix called Windows 7, a worse program. Time to start the process over again.

Goodbye, Windows 7, and good riddance.