Article Source TechFlash
It goes almost without saying that the release of Windows 7 is important for Microsoft to stem the tide of customer dissatisfaction with Vista, which has been extremely damaging to the Microsoft brand, and has caused it to lose users to both the Macintosh and Linux. Vista has been a boon for Apple because most of its growth has come from dissatisfied Windows users. (To be precise, this is a phenomenon mostly limited to the United States and other wealthy Western nations which can afford profit margins that would make a loan shark jealous.)
At the same time, ironically, a new release of Windows doesn’t matter as much as it used to. In the days before the web became so dominant, Microsoft would rally its software partners to ship new versions to be compatible with, and take advantage of, the features offered by the new release. (Windows 95 was about moving the industry to 32-bits. Windows XP was about moving the industry to the NT kernel…)
