prodigious amount of driver incompatibilities, which ultimately
contributed to a negative product perception that Microsoft still can't
shake.
The software vendor is taking pains to eliminate that problem with
Windows 7 by releasing its code at an earlier stage. Partners, such as
Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and others, for example, received code sooner
than they would have in the past, said Stella Chernyak, a director of
Windows Client at Microsoft.
Chernyak said Microsoft felt it needed to engage its partners
earlier in the development cycle so there would be a higher degree of
compatibility in the operating system. For some of those vendors,
Microsoft has already been discussing Windows 7 requirements for 18
months, she said.
Providing access to alpha code is important because it gives
partners time to optimize their products and do some debugging before
the beta, as well as provide more time to develop best practices, said
Daniel Bowers, a product marketing manager for servers at
Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif.
When a service pack comes, hardware requires certain drivers. In the
case of HP, Microsoft depends on the hardware vendor to supply drivers
for servers and storage, for example.
One IT manager said he doesn't expect Windows 7 to create anywhere
near the problems he experienced first moving from Windows 95 to XP and
then moving from XP to Vista.
Johan van Walsem, a Windows architect at Rabobank Group, a bank
based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is in the process of upgrading
60,000 end-user desktops to Vista over a two-year period. About 50% of
the desktops needed to be swapped out for new hardware required by
Vista.
The bank tested Vista for about one year before rolling out the
first 5,000 desktops. Van Walsem said the bank expected the upgrade to
be at least as challenging as when it upgraded from Windows 95 to XP,
and it was. But because Windows 7 doesn't require new hardware, as did
Vista, he said he doesn't expect the move to the upcoming OS to be
difficult when the time comes.
Source : http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/
