“Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard aren’t [really] competing directly; instead, each is part of competitive strategy to either grow the Mac user base at Microsoft’s expense, as Apple has been doing, or in Microsoft’s case, to stop the hemorrhaging market share losses and reclaim leadership of desktop operating system development,” Prince McLean writes for AppleInsider.

MacDailyNews Take: Reclaim? Depends on how you define “desktop operating system development,” we guess, but Apple’s lead in ease-of-use and reliability (especially for those of us who were once intimately acquainted with rebuilding the desktop and managing extensions) has never been approached by Microsoft at any time. Windows has always been an insecure, upside-down and backwards Apple Mac knockoff. And that will remain the case with Windows Vista SP3, uh… “Windows 7.”

McLean continues, “Microsoft’s goal with Windows 7 is to lift Vista’s derailed train and put it back on the tracks. Windows 7 itself is internally called Windows 6.1, essentially Vista Service Pack 2 (Microsoft is also preparing a scaled down Vista SP2 for delivery shortly before Windows 7 is released). Microsoft’s executives have made no secret of the fact that Windows 7 is an incremental improvement to Windows Vista, with CEO Steve Ballmer calling it ‘Windows Vista, a lot better,’ and saying, ‘Windows 7 is Windows Vista with cleanup in user interface [and] improvements in performance.’”

“To impress downloaders of the Windows 7 public beta, Microsoft has numbered the release 7000.0. It also refers to Windows 7 as a monumental release, and of course, the ‘best Windows ever,’” McLean writes.

“Before Microsoft had released any real details on the new operating system, some fan sites initially described Windows 7 as being ‘completely rewritten from the ground up,’thinking that a massive rewrite was exactly what Microsoft needed to get around the problems associated with Vista,” McLean writes. “However, an actual rewrite would really just create massive new compatibility problems, just as the company discovered during the years of development delays that plagued Longhorn and Vista. It would also take a very long time, and time isn’t on Microsoft’s side.”

Full article here.