cM :: MORLEY|DIGITAL

Well, we did it - kicked our first Windows 7 systems out the door.  What a helluva feeling.

Rewind nearly 3 years.

I had just jumped back in, headfirst, into systems integration when Vista came out about 6 months later.  Leading up to that I had to juggle doubling production volumes with becoming an OEM partner.  This meant a whole new world of pain as it pertained to deployment and a new set of responsibilities to Microsoft.

I remember getting up really early to switch over the configurators to include the new Vista SKUs.  We were all pretty excited!  A new, fancy OS with a new release of DirectX and new features including Digital Cable.  And sales were doing well!  Then a funny thing happened - people started saying Vista sucked!  We were scratching our heads as we knew that OUR systems didn’t suck - they had fast processors, lots of RAM, fast hard drives, and were extremely stable.  Heck, we even won a few awards!

But unfortunately, when you’re just a multi-million dollar corporation, what you do in a marketplace dominated by multi-billion dollar corporations simply cannot overcome public perception.

The large, multi-national Tier 1s continued to load crapware, bloatware, and shovelware into their PCs, all the while driving prices down by using hardware from the lowest bidder.  Laptops, with already slow mobile HDDs, were RAM starved with 1GB - making the Vista experience unnecessarily painful.  I know, I bought a cheap, throwaway laptop during that time in an emergency situation.  It came with 1GB of RAM.  It was awful.  Throw in 2GB of RAM and it became a new machine.

It was these “captains of industry” that ultimately screwed Vista.  Sure, it had its flaws, and plenty of them.  The problem, however, was that it wasn’t idiot-proof enough for the multi-nationals, who designed to price, not to performance.  Thankfully, Microsoft has stepped up the game, big time, and you’d really have to be a few short of a six pack to screw up a Windows 7 system design.

The bottom line is that Microsoft Windows 7 is the finest consumer operating system on the market, period.

And thanks to Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, along with cheap memory prices, the hardware out there gives the Tier 1s no excuse for any PC to deliver the same lack-luster performance that many commodity configurations delivered in 2007 and 2008.

With all the momentum that Windows 7 is getting, you’re going to see a resurgence - not just of the PC, but of the boutique.  MAINGEAR will be leading it, you can count on that.