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Windows 7 is coming on October 22.  Compared to the Visa, the 3-year old OS with a lo of disappointments, Windows 7 seems to have more positive expectation from users all over.

Windows Anytime Upgrade

XP, Win 7 and Leopard

Many of us decided to stay with XP when Vista came out in 2007 just for the stability of XP and less interruption of works.  Interestingly, Apple is poised to take advantage of this window of time when people are considering operating system (OS) upgrade.  OS upgrade is usually a task of zero fun, and switching to a cool and less virus prone Apple world could be an option.  Apple took the lead and released the Snow Leopard, its newer OS about four month ago.

Apple’s strategy does have some merit because upgrade involves so much time and effort to backup data  (all those music, video and photos), reformat your PC, and re-install the old programs, assuming they will still work in the new OS, then reconfigure them.  This is not a quest from which you can become a better person.

Well, the market favors something cheaper these days.  Without price reduction, it is hard to compete with a netbook, or mini-notebook that costs about $300.  Most people probably will jump on the bandwagon of netbook with installed Win 7.

The Cloud

From a business point of view, desktop OS has less and less influence because your bread and butter tools are more and more going to the online world.  Remember many years ago, Oracle and Sun were champions of network computing.  This kind of hype does not come up that often now, but we are actually a lot closer to that vision.

Big corporations are taking the service-oriented architecture (SOA) route to proliferate function as services, and making the OS a transparent or irrelevant factor.  Amazon webservice s or EC2 is leading the cloud computing where hardware and software capabilities are provided on demand for all sizes of business.  Google has been offering a slew of browser-centric tools attempting to bring the traditional desktop productivity online and merge the offline and online worlds for increasingly mobile professionals.

IT service as commodity

The trend is driven by the demand for agile, scalable and cost-effective information services.  IT services are becoming commoditized and easily distributed.  We can consume IT services as with utility companies.  Gone are days when when we need to commit to a full stack of hardwares, softwares or vendors and IT staffs and a big budget.

Power for the people

Small business, non-profits, or independent workers will be greatly empowered by this trend of technology.  Our personal productivity will be expanded when more essential services are provided as online application platform.  Salesforce.com uses the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to distribute business applications.  Mobile professionals can pick the a service like shopping in a super market and pay by subscriptions.  Amazon offers database and application as instances in its “cloud”,  business can load remotely such computing power on demand at any level and pay by usage.

As we moving more and more away from the technology stage symbolized by the desktop OS, more and more people who wish to enjoy the freedom of independent working environment will find their aspirations being realistic.  Eventually, news such as release of Windows 7 or Apple Leopard will become less interesting.