Will Windows 7 Be Microsoft's Turtle To Apple's Rabbit - Snow Leopard?

A lot of people have been singing the praises of Microsoft's upcoming Vista 2 operating system, better known as Windows 7. It's reported to be more stable, less annoying, much simpler to use, with a host of new OS X like features, such as it's heavily OS X influenced new TaskBar, and best of all.... it's touted much faster speed, one of the biggest goals of the newly renamed OS.

However, it now appears that Windows 7, which originally seemed to be peppier than Vista, doesn't quite cut-the-mustard as they say! Yeppers, according to new speed tests, Windows 7 Release Candidate is actually only slightly faster than Vista after all. In fact, according to InfoWorld, "... the differences may be barely noticeable to users."

Wow, now that was something that, according to previous reports, that I didn't expect at all. It seems that after testing Windows 7 RC against the latest version of Vista, with WorldBench 6 software, on various different machines, both old and new, consistently resulted, for the most part, in barely any speed increase for Windows 7 over that of Vista! There were some exceptions, of course, such as some nice speed increases when using Nero 7.

I don't know, but I think that I smell an opportunity here for Apple and it's famous "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" campaign. After all, if anything hurt Vista it was the perception that it was slower than XP, something that eventually got it's reputation into trouble in the first place.

If this speed perception remains after Windows 7 is finally released, at the end of the year, or early next, then I agree with InfoWorld's statement:

" One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 doesn't significantly improve that situation, it may fail to convince people to move away from Windows XP."

If it turns out that Windows 7 is indeed barely faster than Vista it will be bad enough, but just imagine how much worse it will be for Microsoft's highly touted "new" OS if Apple meets it's goal of making Snow Leopard super fast via it's Grand Central and Open CL features? Wow, now that could possibly be one hell of a nightmare for Microsoft's marketing department!

Recent reports that Windows 7 is barely faster than the latest version of Vista is a downer, to be sure, but it at least it makes me look forward, all the more, with much greater anticipation to the final release of OS X Snow Leopard, which, by all accounts, seems to be gearing up just as Apple promised it would be, namely not only being super secure, super stable, but above all - super, super fast!

So, will Windows 7 be Microsoft's turtle to Apple's rabbit, Snow Leopard? Well, based on the most recent speed reports for both OS's, that might just end up being the case after all, but time will tell.

And that's my 2 cents 4 this Friday, May 08, 2009

Windows 7 screenshot via: ZDNet Australia