A Wish List for Windows 7

http://online.wsj.com/article/portals.html

Dear Windows 7 Programmers, I Have a Few Ideas...

By Lee Gomes, Wall Street Journal
June 4, 2008

While it's still at least two years away, Microsoft is already starting to talk up its Windows 7. Last week, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer showed off some eye candy that might end up a part of the new operating system.
If only because it had such a rough time with Vista, it's a safe bet that Microsoft could use some ideas about Vista's successor. Always eager to help, I came up with a few things I'd like to see included. Readers are invited to email me with their own, and the good ones will be forwarded along via a future column.

Here are mine:

1. One SKU, please.
SKU stands for "stock keeping unit," and one of Microsoft's most baleful decisions for Vista was to wring from it as many SKUs as possible. Thus was born Vista Home, Vista Professional, Vegetarian Vista, etc. Each successive version had more features and, naturally, a bigger price tag.
Whatever incremental revenue Microsoft raised with this ploy couldn't possibly have been worth the confusion and ill-will it engendered. A certain technology columnist who will here go unnamed because I don't want to embarrass myself, once spent a lengthy session with Microsoft tech support trying to get my Vista to see a disk drive. Only well into the process was it discovered that the requisite "dynamic disk" feature wasn't in that particular SKU.
If society is going to be inflicted with an operating-system monopoly, society might at least get the benefits -- especially the one where everyone shares a common base of the same software. The Vista SKU epidemic gives us the worst of both worlds: software silos combined with a single big supplier.

2. Smart, scalable graphics.
This was supposed to have been in Vista, but was dropped at the last minute. Here is the problem: Increase the resolution on your monitor and icons respond by getting smaller. That occurs because Windows is continuing to draw them at the same size, perhaps 256 by 256 pixels. But now, because there are more pixels on the higher-resolution screen, the icons take up less space. For most people, that just means they are harder to read.
When presented with a higher-resolution screen, a smarter graphics system would draw the icon the same physical size, but take advantage of the extra pixels to create a crisper, more detailed image. Thus equipped, Windows users would be able to make full use of the ultrahigh-resolution LCD displays coming into the market. You'll have screen text that is small, but still as easy to read as what you get with print.

3. OS snapshots and an undo feature.
Apple, VMWare and Sun Micrososytems all have elegant and useful file-system features that Microsoft should steal, and then indignantly deny doing so. Apple's Time Machine lets you undo changes to your entire computer just like you do with a document in Word. VMWare does them one better by allowing you to take "snapshots" of the condition of your operating system, and then have them branch off into different directions, like the lineage charts in a family tree. Sun does a little of both.
Those features could make user life easier. Picked up a piece of spyware online this morning? That's OK; restore the machine to how it was last night, something the current System Restore seems to be able to do only sporadically.
You need copious disk space to do all this. But with terabyte drives tumbling toward $100, it will hardly be a problem.

4. Open it up.
Open-source software such as Linux is traditionally seen as the opposite of proprietary software from the likes of Microsoft and Apple. But that's a false dichotomy. Why can't Windows be proprietary, for-profit and copy-protected -- while at the same time be open for user control and inspection? If Windows were a car, you'd never be able to open the hood and see what was underneath.
The software's "black boxness" was driven home for me once when XP was taking an excruciatingly long time to load, and even the best tech sleuths at Microsoft couldn't figure out the cause. Had I been able to look under cover, I might have seen, oh, that Windows was wasting 90 seconds looking for a nonexistent drive.