Deja Vista?

[Updated 11/14 with additional quotes]

Are we going to have to write a Windows 7 version of Anything but Speechless: 100 Things People Are Really Saying About Windows Vista? The upcoming successor to Vista – the future OS that all the Windows users are skipping Vista in favor of – should be MS's chance to patch the cracks, squash the bugs, and lance the boils. And with a pre-beta version of Windows 7 spread by MS at its Professional Developers Conference just before Halloween, it looks like the OS may even crawl into the world faster than Vista did.

Yet when InfoWorld gave Windows 7 a through benchmarking and shakedown, the result was the same ill foreboding that accompanied pre-release Vista (and proved all too accurate). Get a load of what InfoWorld says:

• "From a raw throughput perspective, Windows 7 promises to perform as poorly as its predecessor."
• "Overall, the changes are mostly superficial. Even the new Task Bar is simply a twist on the existing Explorer UI model, not to mention a blatant rip-off of the Mac OS X dock. Moreover, none of Windows 7's UI goodness is the result of any architectural changes to the OS."
• "...we can now say with some certainty that Windows 7 is in fact just a repackaging of Windows Vista."
• "Bottom line: So far, Windows 7 looks and behaves almost exactly like Windows Vista. It performs almost exactly like Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues."
• "IT organizations rejected Windows Vista en masse, and Windows 7 is Microsoft's response. Simply put, it's not enough. Slapping an upgraded UI onto an already discredited OS platform fools nobody and serves only to further alienate the very enterprise customers whom Microsoft claims to be wooing."
• "The larger question is what all those Vista refuseniks will do when their hopes for Windows 7 are crushed."
• "...for many shops, this may be the perfect opportunity to seriously explore the alternatives outside Microsoft. Ubuntu Linux gets more polished each quarter, while Apple hardware and Mac OS X continue to impress technical and nontechnical users alike."
• "One thing's for sure: Microsoft's once unassailable dominance of the enterprise desktop is wobbling on a precipice. Windows Vista has permanently eroded the company's reputation among IT decision makers, and from what we've seen of Windows 7 so far, Microsoft still does not "get IT." "

Wow, that's a kick in the eye and a sharp stick in the groin, all wrapped into one. Yet still not enough, as the same author also decided to deliver a roundhouse to the sinuses as well, in a PC World Windows 7 review with subheadings like "Lipstick on a Pig" and comments including:

• "So far, Windows 7 looks, behaves, and performs almost exactly like Windows Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista. In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues."
• "If Windows 7 really is Vista at its core--as the close similarity of their System process, memory, and performance profiles suggests--then the fact that Microsoft has still managed to break applications as popular as Skype is disconcerting. At the very least, it doesn't bode well for Microsoft's promises to make the Vista-to-Windows 7 transition truly seamless."
• "Windows Vista has permanently eroded the company's reputation among IT decision makers, and from what we've seen of Windows 7 so far, Microsoft still doesn't get it."

Okay, that's just one author. And remember an all-important point: Windows 7 is pre-beta software. (To be exact, it's the pre-beta software known as the shipping version of Vista.)  It'll get better... right?