No surprise: Win 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are meant for each other

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 10 November 2008 06:40

Opinion and Analysis

Although Microsoft is promising Windows 7 is a “major update” to Vista, which in many ways it is, the next version of Windows Server 2008 won’t be called Windows Server 7 but instead “Windows Server 2008 R2” in what is a case of slight mixed messages from Microsoft.

Ok, ok – can there really be any doubt that Windows 7 is a better version of Vista, especially after Steve Ballmer himself said Windows 7 is Windows Vista “done right”?

For all the doubt however that Windows 7 is little more than a service pack 2 for Vista, Windows 7 is still going to be the version of Windows that all XP and Vista users will want, especially given that Windows 7 runs better on existing technology and is even being made to work nicely on netbooks.

Many machines running XP today are more powerful than most netbooks, and if they require any upgrade at all, it would be for memory, thus giving Microsoft its biggest upgrade opportunity in years. Let’s hope they price Windows 7 affordably, and even sell 3 and 5 user licenses for home users at REALISTIC prices in store.

Microsoft could really rake in the cash, especially where the competition is more expensive Mac OS X PCs, and free copies of Linux. 2009 really is a marquee year for Microsoft, if they stuff it up it could well be the beginning of the end of Microsoft’s massive dominance.

But alongside the consumer market is the all important business and enterprise market, and given Linux’s much larger market share in the server market (30% +) compared with only 1.04% of consumer desktops, Windows Server 2008 R2 needs to be an even bigger success than Windows Server 2008 currently is.

Luckily for Microsoft, Windows Server 2008 has suffered none of the vicious Vista reviews, instead being an OS that Microsoft users love, with many even using it in “desktop” mode as a kind of “super Vista”.

While this will likely still happen with Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 is shaping up to be a vastly superior consumer version of Windows, so if it does happen, it will likely be less prevalent than it is today.

Microsoft is promising that Windows Server 2008 R2 builds on the existing version, coming with “new virtualisation tools, Web resources, management enhancements, and exciting Windows 7 integration” which will do all the usual things that Microsoft promises companies, such as saving time, reducing costs and “providing a platform for a dynamic and efficiently managed data center.”

And naturally the usual components plus the new virtualisation components are wihing: IIS 7.0, an updated Server Manager and Hyper-V, Windows PowerShell 2.0 and more, with companies already testing the pre-beta version just as the Windows 7 pre-beta is spreading across the Internet like wildfile.

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