Walt Mossberg Declares Windows 7 "A Windows to Help You Forget"

Of course, he's referring to Vista, the clusterfuck Microsoft put out and called an OS. You can read Walt's review here. Of course, it's still Windows, which means you have a registry to deal with, which means if you're upgrading from XP you're in for the long nightmare of backup, wipe, install, put back, reinstall, update, update, oh, update again, and finally, update. Then, when you're done doing that, in case you forgot to install any security software, there's that trainwreck of an afternoon killer. Yep, install the security software, update all the virus and malware definitions, do that some more, maybe update the scanning engine. Oh, and make sure your firewall is set properly before you do any of that, otherwise you're not going anywhere on the InterTubing SuperDuperHighway, chico.

So, the Guru of All Things Tech has given Windows 7 his blessing. That's good news for Microsoft and the roughly 90% of the computing world running some flavor of Windows. Hey, if you're going to stick with a beast, at least have it somewhat housebroken. Still, Phillip Elmer-DeWitt over at Fortune puts up this response to Mossberg's review: What's wrong with Windows 7.

Though, the best part of DeWitt's response has to be this last bit:

UPDATE: Kudos to reader Jon T. of Cardiff, Wales, for digging up this quote from Mossberg's review of Vista:

"After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced." — Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18, 2007

"After using pre-release versions of Windows 7 for nine months, and intensively testing the final version for the past month on many different machines, I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced." — Wall Street Journal, Oct. 8, 2009

Oops, Walt, maybe you should have taken some more time writing this most recent review.

Okay, we can all look askance at Mr. Mossberg here and ask ourselves, and maybe even our neighbors, "Is Walt smoking something, or has Microsoft paid him huge chunks of money and we're going to hear about how after this last review he suddenly retired to some beach in the Bahamas?" Or, we can take a reality check and remember that each iteration of Windows has been called Microsoft's Best Yet. Well, except for ME.

Truth is, the company does continue to provide new and nifty things in their desktop OS. So what if much of it is derivative of others, and the company is much more the follower in the tech industry than an actual leader, especially when it comes to their flagship products? And, so what if their crazy pursuit of backward compatibility that allows their customers to run programs from 1983 means that they produce bloated, security hole riddled, unstable, unintuitive, user-antagonistic pieces of shit? Hey, each version is better than the last, right?

Anyway, if you really want to get a quick read of what Mossberg is really getting at, read DeWitt's response. That's all you really need to know.