Recently, Steve Ballmer said that Windows 7 is the best OS from Microsoft till date. Now that Windows 7 is finally available, users will be able to decide if or not Ballmer’s statements are true. Till now, Windows 7 has received favorable reviews and it appears that it is doing quite well as far as sales are concerned.
How can one measure if an OS is the best? Coming to a firm conclusion is not so easy as all OSes have both pros and cons.
Price
Price is one of the major factors one takes into consideration while choosing an OS. Then again, there are many caveats. For example, Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade edition costs $120. On the other hand, Mac OS X Snow Leopard costs only $29. But you can’t run it on cheap PC hardware. You need a MAC to use it. So overall, it is way costlier than Windows.
Then again, Linux is free. But many users (especially less tech savvy people) find it very difficult to use. In other words, the learning-curve is very steep. Despite this, Linux always beats Windows when it comes to stability and security.
Market Share
Market share represents how good a product is. However, this is not a definitive metric. This is because it is possible to push a product using aggressive marketing and make it the market leader. The pros and cons of the product would be immaterial then. Everyone uses it, so the new user will have no other go except to use it himself/herself.
According to statistics, Windows Xp is still the most popular OS. Even today, more than 70 per cent of the users have Windows Xp installed on their computer. Around 18 per cent Windows Vista while 5 per cent use MAC OS.
Vulnerabilities / Stability
We cannot consider an OS to be the best if it crashes every now and then or if it is prone to viruses. Microsoft’s products have always been criticized by security experts for their flaws and vulnerabilities. In the recent years, Microsoft has been taking strong measures to fix bugs and vulnerabilities in its software.
Security was one of the major concerns that was properly addressed during the development of Windows 7. Windows 7 is very secure and stable and so is not to vulnerable to viruses and malware, at least for now.
On the other hand, Linux is much more secure. This is disputed by many who say Linux is equally vulnerable except that malware-writers don’t bother due to low market share and tech-savvy nature of Linux users.
Hardware Compatibility
As OS should run on a range of different hardware. At the same time, system requirements should be reasonable. The OS should also be compatible with other software and vice versa. There is no point in creating a new Windows upgrade which will render all the older software useless.
Windows is definitely the market leader when it comes to software availability. While it is true that Linux distros such as Ubuntu offer many software for free, many of the commercial software have no equivalents in the free software world.
To conclude, Steve Ballmer’s statements are neither right nor wrong. They represent his opinion, nothing more. If you ask me, I would say Windows 2000 was the best OS in Microsoft’s history…