- So I've been getting emails
and emails and all kinds of messages from viewers to make
the video that seemingly you have all been waiting for. So here we are, the one on Windows 7. The operating system Microsoft
released in 2009 that has widely been considered the best version of Windows ever made. And this isn't just
the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia talking. This was quite the popular opinion when the OS was released. Many critics praised the
OS for its slick design, easy to use desktop interface, and its implementation of
features that made it much more similar to other competing
operating systems of the time, such as Apple's Mac OS 10. In fact, NBC News columnist
Gary Krakow described his first experience with Windows 7 as clean, clear, and just a pleasure. He went even further to
explain that Windows 7 was a terrific, terrific operating system and that it apparently took
Bill Gates leaving the company for Microsoft to finally get it right. Now, if you've seen my
other videos on Windows, you may know this statement
as being in reference to Microsoft's previous
OS release Windows Vista, which at a superficial glance
looks and operates practically identical to Windows 7 with
both systems even boasting the famous Aero Theme, yet
just three years earlier, Krakow had described Windows
Vista as one of the worst operating system experiences
that he'd ever encountered. I mean, surely they can't
be that different, right? Actually, yes, and don't
call me Shirley Airplane. (upbeat music) Now, all this might
seem a bit like Deja vu and calling Windows 7
more or less a rebranded version of Vista would be
very reductive in not telling the full story, but still
the failure of Windows Vista does play an integral
role in Windows 7 success, but at the same time,
just from looking at it, it's really hard to see
why that's the case. When we look at an operating
system like Windows Vista, in retrospect, we can really
appreciate it for just how many great features it introduced that we take for granted today. When Vista was first released in 2006, Windows XP was the most commonly
used operating system in the world, and Vista solved
a ton of its problems, a more contemporary design, a super fast search bar being
built into the start menu, master file navigation,
just to name a few, yet Vista would become an
object of scorn in ridicule while Windows 7, which possessed all these same features, would be
met with unanimous love and praise two years later. Why? What happened? Well, that's what this video is about. Today we will be diving into
the history behind one of Microsoft's most revered
operating systems and how it's designed with Lay the foundation
for all future Windows releases, including the
ones that we use today. (keyboard typing) And you're probably wondering why I'm in front of the
camera all of a sudden. Well, I'm lonely and I need friends, but also it's because I just
cannot contain my enthusiasm for "Ground News." Now, looking at the news can
be just so frustrating because people are so busy shoving
their views down your throat rather than telling you the full story. But Ground News is a platform
that allows you to compare articles from multiple news
sources to help you find the one that has the least amount of bias. Now, I know we've talked in
the past about how Gary Krakow really wasn't a fan of Windows Vista. Well, during my research, I came across this article
from just eight months later where he describes it as
"A good operating system." What Gary? All right, how much did Bill
Gates pay you to write that? (audience applauding) No, but what's really great is
that Ground News provides you a homepage of all the latest
stories with a percentage of where it sources lean politically. In this case, 74% of them
that covered this story are politically in the center. And when I click on this, it
shows me each sources political bias, which ones submitted
first, their level of credibility, et cetera. I can also compare other
articles covering the same story, but politics can get annoying. Well, "Ground News" also
gives you the option to choose your own topics,
and they don't have to be political. Here I am looking at articles on Windows 7 and I can find other sources
covering the same story. They also have a browser
extension where you can see the level of bias on an
article as you're viewing it, and now you too can get access
to transparent news coverage by visiting ground.news/nation squid. You can sign up for free or
subscribe for unlimited access to the latest news while
avoiding all the bias. Be sure to check it out. In the simplest of terms,
the success of Windows 7 relied on three big components. It came out at exactly the right time. It facilitated the Windows
experience, and of course, well nostalgia. But obviously that leaves
out important information and there's a lot more
to the story than that. To fully understand how these
three factors come into play requires diving deep into Windows 7s development history. Which not only started
before the release of Vista, but even before the release of
XP all the way back in 2001. Now, Windows 7s development started at around the same time as Vistas, but Microsoft wasn't
aware of this at the time. In a lot of ways, Windows
7 was kind of created on accident, at least the version of it that we recognized today. You see, back in the 90s,
Microsoft had a very different vision of what direction
they wanted Windows to head in for the next decade. They were going to release
three versions of Windows throughout the 2000s, Windows Whistler, Windows Longhorn, and Windows Blackcomb. Now, I've already gone into
great detail on what happened with these three versions
of Windows in my video on Windows Vista, so I
will try to sum this all up as quickly as I can, but
if you'd like to learn more about that, go ahead and
check that video out, if you haven't already. You might notice that I am
mentioning Windows Vista a lot in this video, and that's no coincidence, there is a ton of overlap
between Vista and Seven. In short, there were a ton
of factors that interfered with this vision for Windows
that Microsoft put together, primarily bad planning and perfectionism. First off, two of these
releases were meant to be big, entirely new versions of
Windows Whistler and Blackcomb Windows Longhorn was
essentially just going to be an incremental update,
kind of like the equivalent of Microsoft releasing
Windows 98 and then releasing Windows 98 SE a year later they're different, but
more or less the same. Whistler would go on to be
released in 2001 as Windows XP. And now the next big version
of Windows was going to be Blackcomb, scheduled for release
in the second half of 2002, but Windows XP had
literally just come out. Did it really make sense to
create a big whole new version of Windows only to come out
with another big release hardly a year later? That just simply isn't enough time for the public to get
accustomed to things. Not to mention that
hardly gives them any time to complete Longhorn. Microsoft realized their
plans were way too ambitious and that they were moving
way too fast, so they decided to postpone the release
of Blackcomb and to focus more on their smaller
release, Windows Longhorn, and that was their next problem. Keep in mind that in the 2000s, computer software was
advancing at an alarming rate. So Microsoft had a lot of fun
coming up with new innovative features for Longhorn, a
little too much fun over time, Longhorn essentially became a
pet project for the company, the version of Windows that
would encompass every digital fad of the odds. Word was now getting around
about Longhorn and even some leaks of it surfaced
online as they continued adding on feature after feature,
this would only continue to push Blackcomb's release
date further and further until it was pretty
much left up in the air. Eventually this would
happen to Longhorn as well as the more features they added, the more time they needed
to actually complete it. The Longhorn project got way too ambitious to the point where
Microsoft didn't even know what direction they
wanted the OS to head in. They even completely
restarted the project in 2004 this time leaving in
only some of its features and changing the name to Windows Vista and it would finally be
released in January of 2007. Given that it took Microsoft
five years to release what was supposed to be a small update
for Windows only for them to completely scrap the project altogether and then released something
that barely even worked on your average Joe's computer in 2007. Yeah, it no wonder that
people were mad and hated Windows Vista. The entire ordeal was a
disaster for Microsoft, and now nearly a decade later, people were still using an
operating system from 2001. They had to figure out
a way to reverse this before Microsoft fell
behind with the times. It was time to finally
start working on Blackcomb, which had just been renamed
to Vienna just a year prior, that name wouldn't last very
long though as the project would be canceled altogether. Microsoft felt that the
project included way too many features for it to be
realistically released on time. So it was then replaced with
a new project code named Windows 7, it would later
be confirmed by Microsoft that this would be the
official name of the OS, not just the codename. And Bill Gates emphasized
that Windows 7 would be designed to be a user-centric
operating system, and that means what you think
it means compared to Vista and even XP, Windows 7 was
going to be much cleaner, easier to navigate. It was also going to be
much faster than Vista even if you ran it on the same hardware. Which means stronger performance,
more bang for your buck, and most importantly, it
was just going to be better. Your overall experience
with Windows 7 would just be more superior than any
other Windows before it, because these are the exact
things that users want. We will get more into
detail later on what these improvements were, but
Microsoft was already heading in the right direction, rather than just arbitrarily throwing
in new features to see what would stick, they
instead focused on features that they knew would
serve their overall goal for the operating system. Just like always, Windows
7 would be continuously improved upon with new
builds that would be created over time during its development. Many of the early ones
looking strikingly similar to Windows Vista, and that's
the way it usually works when a new version of Windows is created. Early builds of XP resembled
2000 early builds of Vista resembled XP, and especially in this case, early builds of Seven
would resemble Vista. A beta version of the OS
would be officially released by Microsoft, giving the public a taste of what the next Windows would be. The release included
a very puny betta fish as the wallpaper and the build
was met with a lot of praise, everything was finally ready. And on July 22nd, 2009,
Windows 7 was released. (welcoming music) And it did extremely well. In fact, sales for
Windows 7 were 234% higher than Windows Vistas during
their first weeks respectively. It even surpassed "Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows" as the biggest grossing
pre-order product of all time. Microsoft was obviously hoping
for Windows 7 to do well, but they weren't expecting
it to do this well. But from looking at the OS's development, we can see why this was the case. The development of Windows 7
after Vista's release was a lot quicker than Vista's development
after XP was released. It didn't take, you know, five years Anyway time like this makes
a huge difference for people. By late 2006, early 2007,
because there had been no big releases of Windows at that time, people were already very accustomed to XP. On top of that, Windows
Vista really did not follow the best marketing during
its pre-order days. Many of those who were following
the development of Longhorn and saw the negative reviews
that came out about Vista's beta release just didn't
think that buying the OS was worth it, and for the rest
of the public who actually did want a new version
of Windows and wanted to pre-order Vista, well,
they literally couldn't. That's because Microsoft
literally stopped pre-orders for Vista, they argued that
they wanted to hold off on doing Vista pre-orders
so that they could level the playing field for
other competing vendors. So yeah, if you combine these factors with the fact that Windows 7 just had a much more elegant entrance
into the computing world and was being offered for
pre-order at a discount, it's no wonder pre-orders did so well. Windows 7 would very quickly
surpass Windows Vista and market share and even
surpass Windows XP just two years later looking back at
the OS in retrospect, you can make the argument
that Windows 7 would not have succeeded in the way that it did, if it hadn't come out
at the time that it did. As we've mentioned before,
Windows Vista absolutely did have its problems, but a big part of its tarnished legacy was just, bad luck. Windows Vista was both ahead
of its time and behind it. Let's go ahead and compare
the hardware requirements for Vista and Seven, notice
how Windows 7's hardware requirements are only marginally higher than the requirements for Vista. Now, compare Vista with the
hardware requirements for XP, we see an astronomical difference. The point is in 2007,
buying a computer with these bare minimum requirements
was much more expensive considering that the
majority of users at the time were still on XP, they
likely still had systems much weaker than this, and let's face it, the average person doesn't
really research what hardware they need before upgrading
their software, they just do it. So when they upgraded their
incompatible machines to Vista, it was just a disaster. But remember, technology
advances exponentially. So three years later
makes a huge difference, and 2009 systems with these
specs are not only much cheaper, but a lot more common, the
idea of an OS like Vista doesn't sound as impractical
anymore, but its reputation is way too ruined for it to recover. So people just buy the new
and fresh Windows 7 instead. So what do the Rolling Stones in Windows 7 have in common, time is
on their side, yes it is. But Windows 7 actually did
solve very real problems that only existed in Windows Vista
by the nature of its design. Vista was a byproduct
of the Longhorn project, which tried way too hard
reinventing the wheel. This alone gave Vista a
rocky start on what exactly it was trying to be. Windows 7, however, was
built on the soul mission of solving a problem, the
Windows Vista problem. So what problems from Vista did it fix? Well, to give a non-exhaustive list, Windows 7 massively improved
User Account Control, a feature designed to prevent
malware from infecting your system by giving the user
direct consent to run a program. But often it was just very
annoying and popped up all the time, Windows 7
gave users more options for how often and when they
wanted the prompts to come up. Because of this, these
pop-ups only occurred a third of the time within
Windows 7 compared to Vista. But this by no means
made Windows 7 less safe if something bad did end up going through, You had Windows Defender,
which was basically a built-in antivirus program for Windows, to quickly put a stop to it. Now, keep in mind that Windows Defender only monitored spyware
during the Windows 7 days, but still it was better than nothing. Users could always install free
versions of programs such as Malware Bites to be on the
lookout for anything else. So at the end of the day,
giving users the option to adjust their user account control settings wasn't that big of a deal. Of course, it is safer to keep
the always notify setting on, but at least users now
had more of a choice. Although Windows Defender was
technically introduced with Windows Vista, given everything
we've just talked about Windows 7's much bigger presence was what ultimately introduced it to the masses. Many people for the first time
had access to features that would otherwise be typically
found behind a paywall with your typical antivirus program. Another great feature was Libraries, although a pretty small
change it would prove to be extremely helpful in the long term. libraries was simply a
page in Windows Explorer that contained your documents, music, pictures, and videos folders. Users could also add their own
folders to this page as well. This made organizing and navigating files so much easier than ever before. And so did Gadgets, while
it didn't post your files, Gadgets allowed users to
quickly gain access to Widgets where they could look at their
calendar, check the weather, use a calculator, et cetera. They could even manually install their own third party gadgets. Windows Vista had introduced
something similar with their sidebar feature, but this
was a bit more distracting and not as customizable. Instead of having to find
these programs individually through the Accessories tab
or even having to go online, all they had to do was
just go to their gadgets and it would show up. And now my personal favorite
feature of Windows 7, the Super bar, not only does
it take Windows Vista's, ski Morphic look to a whole new level, it now shows your programs in
Icon form rather than text, making it much faster to find things if you have a bunch of programs running. But the best part of all
Windows 7 would introduce the Pin to Taskbar feature. One of the great decisions that
Microsoft made with Windows Vista was that they introduced
the Smart Search Tool just a little after the release
of Apple's Mac OS 10 Tiger, which introduced Spotlight Search, and now with Seven Windows
users essentially got their own version of the Dock. The ongoing competition
between Apple and Microsoft was really getting strong here
and there were now striking similarities between
their operating systems. I'll speak for myself here
when I say that Windows 7 was ultimately what made me more
tolerable of Windows machines. I was a Mac user when Windows 7 came out, and although I didn't hate it, I was never the biggest fan at XP, especially that horrid
excuse of a search tool. At least the dog was
cute, and on top of that, I didn't really use Windows
Vista a whole lot when it was around, and Windows XP just
always felt dated to me. I remember in 2006 thinking
that Windows XP was old. I never felt that way with Windows 7. So seeing the striking
differences between XP and Seven was a big deal for me and
made using Windows much easier and less of a headache, while
this is all purely anecdotal, I would not be surprised
if this prolonged exposure to a 2001 operating system
and the lack of exposure to Windows Vista caused many people to embellish the features of Windows 7. It basically just got all
the credit for the stuff that Vista already had. Consequently, people perceive Windows 7 as a much more amazing operating
system than it really was. And that's when we get to
our last component nostalgia. It may not feel like it was that long ago, but Windows 7 is already
developing an aura of nostalgic sentiments around it. Maybe not at the same level
as XP, but it is there. While I personally am not
very nostalgic of Windows 7, there is a new generation of
people that are getting older and do feel that way. For some of them, using
Windows 7 might be one of their earliest memories
and any kind of reminder of it just takes them back to simpler times. And in some ways they literally were. Windows 7 was pretty much
the last version of Windows from the "PC" Era as around
six months after its release, the iPad would come out. And now tablets had officially
entered the scene by a huge degree, and so all versions
of Windows after that were built to be more
tablet and mobile friendly, and a lot of people didn't like that. It's a big reason why Windows
8 flopped and even Windows 10 had a pretty rocky start. I remember upgrading from Seven to 10 when it first came and I hated it. Now, yes, there were
tablet S computers that ran Windows 7 even XP in some cases, but the point was still made clear that these were PC operating systems. You know, the ones that
require a keyboard and mouse. But now that dynamic
was beginning to change. So because of that and the
fact that Windows 7 was built to last a long time like XP,
a lot of people just stayed and didn't really worry about it until support ended in 2020. And when it did, that's
when they realized that they had no choice but to switch now and they had to learn
something completely new because they spent all that time on Seven, they had developed a relationship with it, and this had signified the end of an era. And for most people, that is a feeling that is very bittersweet. Yes, it's an opportunity to
learn something new in life, but it's now also the time
to let go of the past. So in short, what made Windows 7 so great was that it was similar but
also distinct and its own merit. It took something people
were vaguely familiar with and re-transformed it into
something so much better. Microsoft created what
Vista was supposed to be, and just the name Windows
7 alone was powerful enough to make that happen if
Microsoft had released Windows 7 as just another version of Windows Vista, without changing anything
else about the os, sales undeniably wouldn't
have been nearly as big. That's because the Vista
reputation was already damaged beyond repair, no matter
how capable it actually was. We saw that with the Mojave experiment under the name Windows 7,
Microsoft got people to think that this was a new
Windows when in many ways it was really just a
rebranding of Windows Vista, just with most of the problems
fixed and new features added. It was a bumpy road. But Microsoft finally
got what they wanted. There was a YouTube comment
that I got that I think sums it up best, Vista walked
so that Windows 7 could run. What was your favorite
feature of Windows 7? Did you even enjoy it? Let me know your thoughts
in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching,
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