Keith Curtis

Editor's Note: Former Microsoft employee Keith Curtis is a Linux convert and the author of "After the Software Wars."

It goes almost without saying that the release of Windows 7 is important for Microsoft to stem the tide of customer dissatisfaction with Vista, which has been extremely damaging to the Microsoft brand, and has caused it to lose users to both the Macintosh and Linux. Vista has been a boon for Apple because most of its growth has come from dissatisfied Windows users. (To be precise, this is a phenomenon mostly limited to the United States and other wealthy Western nations which can afford profit margins that would make a loan shark jealous.)

At the same time, ironically, a new release of Windows doesn't matter as much as it used to. In the days before the web became so dominant, Microsoft would rally its software partners to ship new versions to be compatible with, and take advantage of, the features offered by the new release. (Windows 95 was about moving the industry to 32-bits. Windows XP was about moving the industry to the NT kernel.)

Some say that Microsoft is just a marketing company, but the fact that customers were unhappy with Vista proves that it is an engineering company, and when it does a bad job, people notice. If it were just about marketing, they wouldn't have any bad feedback, just as Procter & Gamble never gets any bad reviews of their toothpaste. Similarly, if they were only a marketing company, they wouldn't have made a Windows 7 House Party ad that is so easy to parody. (Warning, rated PG-13.) In fact, to slur Microsoft in this way is to misunderstand them. To pick one random fact, when I joined Microsoft in 1993, they had the same number of developers working on Word as Sun has working on all of OpenOffice today — 20.

Software is hard, and Microsoft has many thousands of smart and experienced developers. Its problem is this: Microsoft is greatly hampered by backward compatibility and old code. Having seen lots of codebases inside and outside Microsoft, I conclude that one of the best things the Macintosh and Linux have going for them is that Microsoft has so much baggage that it could be an airline.

I haven't run Windows 7 (I'm still debating which of the 20 editions to install) but I've spent several hours reading about it, and while the list of new features is reasonably impressive, and the reviews are generally positive, the most important aspect is the fundamentals. Will it have sufficiently patched the bugs that Microsoft couldn't get to in Vista's six-year development cycle? Can it run well on machines with a mere 1 gigabyte of RAM? Will it work with the vast array of hardware that is the modern PC industry?

Windows 7 likely won't convert any Apple users back, but it could easily kill off Apple's growth. Reliability, the fodder for most of the Mac versus PC ads, is something Microsoft has within its power to mostly fix. I hear that Apple is one of the top concerns inside Microsoft, but in Cupertino, Microsoft is the sort of permanent nightmare that will cause Steve Jobs to have PTSD. Behind any bluster about Windows 7, he must realize his position is extremely precarious. What will their ads showcase next?

If Apple is threatened by Windows 7, Linux is much less so. Linux runs on the same inexpensive PC hardware, has a robust worldwide community of programmers, less baggage, a better development model, and can be acquired for free.

Many of the benefits of Linux are subtle. It doesn't come with any nagware. The default media player supports both many formats including QuickTime and Windows media. Likewise, the instant messaging program supports 16 different protocols. The GUI is more customizable. But the best feature of Linux is something that neither Windows nor the Macintosh have: a rich set of free applications, installable with one click:

The “Killer App” of Linux is the set of apps it contains. Few programs are up to the polish of Firefox today, but many are good enough, and things are progressing nicely given Linux's estimated 2-3% desktop market share. Unlike its competitors, Linux gets better with more users because of its open development model.

I've been using Linux for four years and have seen dramatic improvements, and even the pace of progress increase. In fact, after spending several years researching the topic, I've become as convinced that Linux is the future of computing as that Wikipedia is the future of the encyclopedia. So Windows 7 may slow the bleeding and hurt Apple's stock price, but it won't change the endgame.

Editor's Note: Keith Curtis' book, After the Software Wars, is available for download and purchase. Also read this excerpt, How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters.

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