Goal of Microsoft - Windows 7 Everywhere

Microsoft officially launched its long-in-development Windows 7 operating system in New York City on Oct. 22. Although Microsoft became a giant by focusing on many of the new functionalities in Windows 7 but the questions is how fast businesses running Windows XP may upgrade to Windows 7, and what Microsoft’s competition will do in response.

Few years back, Bill Gates revealed Microsoft philosophy that saw a computer running Windows on every desk and in every home. During the Windows 7 launch in New York City on Oct. 22, Microsoft again rolled out that philosophy that Windows running not only on PCs, but also smartphones, televisions and virtually everything else sprinkled through a home or office with a screen.

The official demonstrated Play To, which lets a Windows 7 PC stream various media - including digital photos, music and video - to a handful of screens around a house. He also manifested HomeGroup, a feature that supposedly streamlines home networking and make processes easy such as plugging in devices. He also suggested that, despite of economy slowdown, around 300 million PCs will be sold this year in the U.S., before rattling off the various form-factors that customers could select: netbooks, ultra-thins, traditional notebooks, desktops, and the all-in-one style of PC. The ultimate goal of the company is to make Windows computing into every facet of peoples’ lives.

Since the release of Windows Vista three years ago, the operating-system landscape has changed significantly. Although a number of initial user complaints about Vista were settled by that platform’s later service packs. During Vista failure, Apple was able to gain a few points’ worth of market-share. Although the executives have abolished those gains as virtually a rounding error in Microsoft’s dominance of the market of the operating system.

In addition to Apple, Google is also a potential threat to Microsoft which also faces the prospect of competition from Google, whose Android OS is being slowly announced onto netbooks, and which is supposedly producing Google Chrome OS, a strong browser-based operating system, for launch on low-powered laptops sometime in 2010. These alternatives, along with omnipresent Linux, may not be eating substantially into Microsoft’s operating-system market share, but they remain forewarning of a possible future to which Microsoft seems bound to react.

Microsoft has been taking more and more of its core products to the cloud, as part of that reaction. Office 2010, the next generation of its productivity suite, will include stripped-down, cloud-based versions of Word and other programs, which are accessible through Windows Live. And, Windows 7 has been architectured to interact increasingly with the Web.

Now the question arises that how quickly the enterprise and SMBs (small- to medium-sized businesses) working on Windows XP will be willing to migrate their IT infrastructure to Windows 7. The Microsoft officials are probably wondering the same, even if their product proves to be a hit with consumers, what its rivals will be doing to up the competition.