The glowing reviews of Microsoft’s next operating system, Windows 7, and the announcement Tuesday that it will go on sale Oct. 22 have prompted talk of an Apple-Microsoft battle for attention.
Van Baker of Gartner thinks Apple has to step it up to stay in the game. “Windows 7 is an enormous improvement over Vista,” Baker said, “and it will steal the limelight if Apple doesn’t have anything that one ups it.” While he’s not sure if Apple has a “just one more thing” surprise planned for Snow Leopard, he thinks that it needs one to match the behind-the-scenes improvement the company has made in such areas as multi-core support and offloading tasks to the graphics processor.
Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research on the other hand, conceded the win to Windows 7. “I’m not sure that Apple can do very much, there’s not any miracles they can pull off in the interface. So I think they’ll have to let Microsoft have the limelight this time.”