Agile Teams

I’ve been hearing rumbles about Windows 7 for quite a while, had just a bit of hands-on time with it on a colleague’s new laptop, and seen a mentally sticky Mac ad deriding Windows 7 as “waaay better than [ Vista | XP | NT | 3.1 ]”. This morning I attended my first big-picture presentation on Win7, a free event at the NCSU McKimmon Center (details here and here).

It was well attended, planned, and executed; other than a few A/V annoyances, my only quibble is that for future I’d suggest the organizers plan more lecture time for a more leisurely talking pace, and less Q&A time at the end. Presenter Tim Hodgkins, an Enterprise Technology Strategist from a nearby Microsoft office, is clearly experienced and knowledgeable, and he was refreshingly frank – kudos to him for a useful and entertaining talk that effectively addressed a diverse audience.

However, due at least in part to that diversity in interests of the audience, the topics covered weren’t nearly as tech-oriented as I had hoped. While it had been described by NCSU as a ‘business and technical’ talk, the slides actually covered were pretty light on ‘how’ details, and devoid of discussion on financial benefits. My first red flag that it might not be very geeky was the absence of a prominently-posted Twitter hashtag 😉  Then Tim asked the audience at the start whether they were consumer users or enterprise users, and unfortunately for me, the consumers were the vast majority. He then sensibly tailored his talk accordingly, but to address both segments in the two hour lecture time allotted (minus A/V adjustment time), he visibly skipped a bunch of enterprise-focused slides, and had to go pretty fast overall.

I tweeted only once, during a brief A/V break, and the rest of the time I took old-fashioned notes – impressions and reflections now summarized below, with a side note on Windows 7-based entertainment in a separate blog post. (Those of you who already have hands-on experience as Windows 7 users or from beta-testing for months may disagree or have further insights to offer; comments welcome!)

Win7 specifics

• Versions: A number of key improved features for ‘consumers’ are not supported in the most basic Home version, eg Media Center. Tim also commented tactfully on the limited capabilities in the ‘Starter Edition’. So perhaps the Home Premium pricetag should really be considered as the minimum cost for the vast majority of people.
• Upgrading – On the plus side, if Win7 is installed over Vista, you can get dual boot capability by choosing ‘clean install’ into a new partition. But there’s “no upgrade directly from XP to Windows 7”?! Boo – and now the bar’s even higher for what I’d need to see in Win7 to convince me to make the switch from XP Pro any time soon.
• Backward Compatibility costs money: “XP Mode” (Virtual PC 2007) isn’t supported on Home Basic either, and it’s the only fee-free solution (MDEV costs money and is for large enterprises). Also, 256mb may be too low for the default setting for shared memory assigned to Virtual PC, which means that
  (1) Home Premium users will have to muck around in the settings to get older apps to run (one audience member mentioned image editing program GIMP as an example of one that doesn’t run in out-of-the-box VPC), and
  (2) they’ll need more total RAM ($$$) to run the big VPC and normal Win7 effectively.
  Having the free toolkits available is a good start, and maybe the jump from Vista to Win7 is a no-brainer, but given how much app breakage ensued between XP and Vista, migrating from XP is a concern.
• Less is More? Some utilities that used to be preinstalled, like Movie Maker, are now separate downloads (although still free) as “Live Essentials” (not clear though if it’ll be available to Win7 Home Basic users?) This continues the disappointing trend of taking away small but useful multimedia apps (anyone else remember Photo Editor?).
• Security: Plugging the removable-media security hole with BitLockerToGo is a good thing. After drive encryption is complete, it provides backup of recovery info to Active Directory for enterprises, or to another media for home networks. It may take several hours to encrypt a 200gb hard drive, though. Does a drive become unusable if power drops out during that time? Tim also said the very long text string which is your key is saved ‘at the end’. I know if I have to wait hours for a large hard drive to encrypt, I’m going to start it and go off to work or bed – if it finishes but the computer loses power or reboots before I can save the recovery info to another media, will I get another chance? This wasn’t clear.

Product Development Implications

• Caching Pluses and Minuses: Possible performance gains vs. possible incompatibilities from new Branch Office cache strategies (Distributed: Groove-like, Hosted: central server) – Distributed was said to be for “branches without any infrastructure”. [NB: Can a branch actually have no infrastructure? Software systems with ‘no’ (intentional) architecture still have do one, even if it’s just a “big ball of mud”.] And will this ‘play nice’ with dynamically generated files, or with other file or data caching solutions that performance-intensive industrial-quality applications are already using?
• AppControl side effects? This control brings some potential benefits to enterprise IS departments [verbatim quote of Tim’s comment on Windows 7 AppLocker, which I enjoyed so much I tweeted it: “Unlike what we did in XP, it actually works well”], at the cost of power user autonomy and convenience, and may create needs for new error handling in software installers.
• Backward Compatibility, Premium edition: MEDV (MS Enterprise Desktop Virtualization) looks quite nice – we saw a smooth demo of using MEDV for diverting IE8-incompatible websites to IE6 – but MEDV is “not free”.
• Reproducing a problem: The new snippy tool is basic capture/playback with user annotation and logging of UI inputs, nicely mashed together. Product development teams may need to add test cases to see how/if Snippy tool works for capturing problem-reproduction data on their software products – is it only UI operations that get recorded, and (how) can it be launched programmatically? It will be useful for resolving PICNIC issues and for documenting steps-to-reproduce for industrial testers, but it’s not really a substitute for remote desktop connections.
• Safe For Prime Time? – Remote Access (using Ipsec and IPv6) sounds promising, but was essentially not covered, and may not be usable ‘everywhere’; many older routers, which may still be in use in homes and hotels for a while, do not support IPv6. Additionally, given the consequences of security breaches, I think it will be a tough sell to convince enterprise security gurus to give up their SecurID tokens and other VPN solutions, and trust that Remote Access is bulletproof. Unless there’s already a ton of comforting data from intensive security vulnerability testing, I foresee a slow adoption curve on this.

Unanswered questions

(Tim invited the audience to email him and he’d get back with answers):

•  Is HomeGroup bi-directionally compatible with XP SP3? (sharing data as well as consuming it)
• Can Win7 backup/restore read Vista backups? (.ISO files?)

Serendipitous Discovery

• Using the Magnifier for demos (what a great way to make a detail visible to audience members in the back of the room! how did I miss this? it’s in XP and Vista already) and/or on my netbook.

Overall

• When did ‘surface’ get verbed? 😉 The slides used it repeatedly.
• Microsoft appears to be going after Google Desktop (which has come pre-installed by the OEM on the last several computers I’ve purchased) by integrating Bing, search connectors, and pre-indexed ‘Libraries’ into Explorer.

Bottom line: Windows 7 is evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. Some capabilities do seem to be improved, eg BitLocker security and AppLocker. Nothing jumped out at me as must-have, ‘wow’ innovative, or ‘killer’. Overall, I’m still not convinced I should give up XP Pro on my own (non-enterprise) Wintel computers – but I’m still keeping an open mind.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 1:03 am and is filed under events, technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.