What do we know about Windows 7?

The short answer is: nothing. And that's a problem, not only for large companies that are trying to make plans, but even more for Microsoft's credibility in the small-business and consumer markets.

Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray has stirred up a kerfluffle in the blogs with a report titled "Building the Business Case for Windows Vista." The quote that's riled the Linux and Apple fanboys is when he says, "for large businesses, there’s no viable alternative."

Actually, he's probably right. But that's more a monumentally negative comment about the quality of corporate IT departments than anything else. I would submit that there is no fundamental reason a business couldn't standardize on OS X or Linux. What there is is a massive lack of imagination in big businesses. Nobody seems to be having fun in IT any more, have you noticed that?

What caught my eye in the Gray report was one of his five reasons for biting the Vista bullet: Business customers can't wait for Windows 7. Why? Because nobody knows anything about it.

He's hit an unexpected sore spot. One of the major strategies for coping with the disappointment that is Vista has been to ignore it, and decide to wait for the next release of Windows, which has been promised for Real Soon Now – 2010, which is a lot less time than we waited between Vista and the previous version, Windows XP.

But what do we know about Windows 7? Nothing. We know what we're wishing and hoping for – an un-Vista, a shiny new OS with lots of truly new technology, not something recycled. A couple of analysts from Forrester's archrival Gartner stirred up a kerfluffle of their own last week with the clickbait claim that "Windows is collapsing." Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald's reasons were depressingly familiar – Microsoft is drowning in the bloated Windows code base, which in the case of Vista made it impossible to produce a truly new version of the OS in a reasonable timeframe.

Then they offered their solution – a rosy vision of a "very modular and virtualized" Windows 7 built around a hypervisor: "An OS, in this case Windows, will ride atop the hypervisor, but it will be much thinner, smaller and modular than it is today. Even the Win32 API set should be a module that can be deployed to maintain support for traditional Windows applications on some devices, but other[s] may not have that module installed."

"Hypervisor" is the buzzword du jour – blogger Bill Pytlovany echos Silver and MacDonald. He sees a future that holds "an OS designed to host virtual machines running via a thin hypervisor code level. This would make Windows the key OS that every thing else can run on top of. It also allows Microsoft developers to create exciting new functions but continue to keep backward/legacy capability."

Doesn't that sound wonderful? There are only two problems with it:

One is that it's not reality-based. It's a beautiful dream. So far, the reality of Windows 7 is that, as Paul Thurrott, for one, reports, the first external build of Windows 7 he's seen (which, admittedly, dated back to December 2007) "is just a slightly enhanced version of Windows Vista."

The second is that in the absence of real information, all this non-information takes on a life of its own. We want to believe that Windows 7 will be dazzling technology, and we want – some of us in IT may even need -- to believe that it will ship in 2009.

But, as Forrester's Gray points out, beyond the basic information that Windows 7 will be a full release of Windows and it's targeted to ship in 2010, everything else is pure rumor and speculation.

Well, he knows one more thing: "Microsoft doesn’t exactly have a clean track record for delivering products on time. It also tends to strip out promised features in order to hit deadlines (e.g., WinFS from Windows Vista). Ironically, one of Microsoft’s biggest weaknesses — the unpredictable release schedule of its desktop operating systems — will likely spur adoption of Windows Vista as a result of this lack of faith in Microsoft delivering Windows 7 on time."

That's the core of Gray's argument for moving to Vista. It has nothing to do with any features or benefits of Vista, and it's made in the context of advising Forrester's business customers. The rest of us – medium and small businesses; sole proprietors; consumers; anybody, in fact, who doesn't have a dedicated IT staff and site-licensing contracts with Microsoft – have plenty of options.

Gray, Silver, and MacDonald are all correct about one thing: the problem with Vista wasn't the product, it was the process. And that's what Microsoft has to sell us on with Windows 7. It has to restore our faith in its ability to deliver what we want, not just what we can have.

That means the company has to start telling us – now – what Windows 7 is going to be, and begin demonstrating – now – that it can deliver on those promises. It's a truism that big businesses don't buy a product, they buy a relationship with a business partner, which is one reason it's been so hard for Linux and even Apple to break into big businesses: they simply haven't been big enough to be visible; they haven't looked like viable partners.

Benjamin Gray's advice sounds like resigned acceptance: don't hope too much, take what you can get and use it as best you can. Don't expect better from Microsoft, because you're likely to be disappointed again.

That's Microsoft's biggest competition. That's why it needs to make the development process for Windows 7 very different, much more transparent. It's a big risk, but if Microsoft wants to salvage its relationship with its customers – the small ones as well as the big ones -- it's necessary.