In 2006, Microsoft released Windows Vista. It was supposed to be great but it was delivered years late, and when it finally released it was a slow, buggy mess that no one wanted to use. It wanted all of your memory, and it wouldn’t run well on the computer you already had without significant upgrades. People went out of their way to use its predecessor, since it was consistently faster and more compatible with their applications.
Let me type that paragraph again, with a few subtle changes: In 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0. It was supposed to be great but it was delivered years late, and when it finally released it was a slow, buggy mess that no one wanted to use. It wanted all of your memory, and it wouldn’t run well on the computer you already had without significant upgrades. People went out of their way to use its predecessor, since it was consistently faster and more compatible with their applications.
Microsoft had originally confirmed that Windows 7 wouldn’t be released till 2010. We then started hearing rumours that it could come along in time for the holiday season.
Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is an anti-malware product that works via the cloud, a successor to OneCare, and contains quite a bit of promise. The beta versions had a strong ability to detect and remove malware, and as the product grows, its strength will only increase as more and more users automatically submit telemetry to the cloud. Even so, MSE already has a strong base, with 400,000 testers during the beta release.