On Monday I attended a small Windows 7 Launch event in London attended by around 100 people, which featured a 45 minute or so session with Steve Ballmer.
It was a bit strange seeing Steve Ballmer in the flesh for the first time. He was a lot smaller than I expected – probably cause he looks larger than life on Youtube! I wimped out on taking photos of the event because nobody else was taking photos apart from the guy sitting next to me who was trying to take snaps discretely on his iphone (which I thought was very brave), and I didn’t want to look like Steve’s number one fan…
In Steve Ballmer’s presentation he did mention some Windows 7 facts I hadn’t come across before:
- Windows 7 was tested globally by 8m users with 700k in the UK
- In UK trials, businesses have seen savings of between £100-150 in annual support costs. Steve Ballmer even used my old employer (I left last month-was how I managed to get an invite) as an example. I was impressed that he knew that they were moving to Windows 7 in a 100k+ employee deployment following favourable tests, although he did neglect to mention that they were moving from XP to Windows 7 after deciding to skip Windows Vista…
- That despite the poor perception that Windows Vista had, it’s a myth that people didn’t upgrade -the same number of users moved from XP–>Vista as moved from windows 95–>XP
In the Q&A session Steve Ballmer expressed his hopes that users would buy new PCs with Windows 7 rather than buying new machines running XP or Vista. Steve said that by making XP ‘End of life’ from a support perspective, Microsoft hoped this would move new PC customers upwards to Windows 7.
“We hope that in the first three to six months we will have made the case that [new PCs] should come with Windows 7. If customers have been doing testing with Vista, that should make it easier to move. You’ll see us work hard to make Windows 7 the default choice on new PCs, whether you decide to move your entire installed base or not,” he said.
One question was fielded asking whether Windows 7 would be Microsoft’s last operating system. Steve Ballmer said no, as the Microsoft teams are already working on Windows 8 and Windows 9, and that client OSs are here to stay for at least 10 years:
“After Vista, many in the media said that it’d be the last Windows release ever, but there’s still a lot of work to do. We don’t have voice and gesture recognition built in, and you can’t have everything seamlessly managed from the cloud yet,” he said.
Steve Ballmer also pointed to the fact that other companies are working hard on OSs, so there was still plenty of work to be done. He poked fun at Google a couple of times:
“Google have two [OS] in Chrome and Android…I’m not sure why they are building two “
I’m glad I attended as it was quite refreshing to see Steve Ballmer speak quite candidly about the plans for Windows 7, but also because (as I’d hoped!) all attendees got a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate to take home with them.
