Windows 7: Upgraded version of Vista

A year ago, I wouldn't have predicted that I'd be reviewing a public beta test of Windows Vista's replacement this week. And yet here I am, assessing Windows 7 in today's column.

Microsoft deserves some congratulations for moving forward this quickly on Vista's successor. But the speed with which the company has brought Windows 7 to beta status itself constitutes the strongest evidence that 7 won't provide any drastic break from Windows as we've known it.
(Bear in mind that while I don't love Vista, I don't hate it or prefer XP over it; I think all of these Windows releases have serious problems, some more serious than others.) The interface improvements that Microsoft has been showing off since last fall represent welcome changes. The new taskbar tiles both leave more room to display open applications and eliminate the redundant "Quick Launch" toolbar. 7's practice of providing access to recently-opened files via pop-up menus from those taskbar buttons and Start menu items looks likely to be the Windows 7 feature that I'll miss most when I'm not using this operating system. And the new gesture-based windows management tricks sure do make for an impressive demo.

Plus, I will never complain too much about an operating-system update that uses less memory than its predecessor. But other changes in Windows 7 look like they'll only complicate matters. I don't get the "Libraries" concept, for instance; hasn't Windows provided specifically-named "documents," "pictures," "music" and "videos" folders for most of the past decade precisely to group your files by type? Why do we need yet another set of folders to sort our documents, pictures, music and videos? Windows 7's "homegroup" feature seems even more impractical. The idea of declaring a new "standard" that only works in the very latest version of Windows exhibits the sort of kooky arrogance that I thought Microsoft had left behind after its antitrust settlement. Put another way, can't this company do better than to provide a (sort of) zero-configuration home-file-sharing scheme with such restrictive system requirements when an open standard allowing about the same thing has existed for over a decade and has been supported in a competing operating system since 2002?

Microsoft's decision to remove most of Vista's accessory programs also puzzles me. Why yank the e-mail (e-mail!), photo-album, instant-messaging, calendar and address-book applications, but keep the usual folder's worth of games and both WordPad and Notepad (which is itself joined by a Sticky Notes applet)? It's less than clear what kind of rationale Microsoft used before voting some of these programs off the island. Also unclear: how many inexperienced or nervous users will bother downloading the replacements Microsoft offers at its Windows Live site.
And many of the things I didn't like in Vista when I first reviewed it and when I took a second look at it a year later--not to mention the items many of you have complained about here--show no signs of departing Windows 7.

To fix those deeper-seated ailments, however, Microsoft would have had to put in a lot more than two years of work. We might not be able to try out Vista's replacement for another year or two--but at that point, we might see a dramatically improved operating system that could never be mistaken for a Service Pack update to Vista. That's the question I want to put to you: Are you happy to get 7's bundle of evolutionary upgrades to Vista this soon, or would you rather wait longer for a revolutionary improvement to Windows?