Ever had the feeling that you know exactly where some technology needs to be heading, but you’re not sure that the major corporations behind it will realize it because they’re too tangled in their own affairs to see wood for the trees? When it comes to Windows 7, even before any details about it were officially shown, it seemed painfully obvious what Microsoft needed to do.

It needs to create a lightweight, fast, undemanding OS which will shed all of Vista’s fat, and for the first time in history really be twice as fast as the last OS. It’s not only because of the netbooks, which honestly cannot run Vista (not foreseeing where the laptop market will be heading was a huge blunder by Microsoft) - it’s simply because people are sick of big, fat, bloated, slow things and they want something different.

For the first time, they’re promising less features and really focusing on speed and reliability when talking about their next OS. The question is, how much of Vista’s shadow will be cast on the new OS? After all, Vista took 6 years to make; developers working on Windows 7 won’t have that much time, and they’ll probably constantly be reminded that this or that feature of Vista was great, it only needs some more polishing.

Wrong. Vista was partly a mistake (especially the part where they made sure weaker machines can’t run it, and then the market was overwhelmed with netbooks), and partly badly polished Windows XP. Sidebar? Windows 7 won’t have it any more. Good riddance.

The story is that there are obviously a lot of developers and project managers over at Microsoft who operate in an old-fashioned frame of mind which led them to produce the fat mistake that is Vista. Microsoft needs to put an end to this and embrace a new philosophy; they need to put speed and simplicity at the forefront and create something opposite from Vista. Time will tell if they’re capable of that.