Windows 7

Last night I was laying in bed and reading Engadget when I remembered that Microsoft and Steve Ballmer was giving the keynote speech at CES in Vegas. After seeing the leaked copy of the original beta of Windows 7 and reading about how it blew away Vista and XP, I was interested to see if Microsoft would actually talk and push the OS since they are notoriously late about getting new software out the door. Amazingly, it was the highlight of the talk. The beta is being released world-wide today and it actually looks pretty good. Not that I would consider switching back, but it at least appears they are copying the good from Mac OS X in terms of networking and interface design. This can only be a good thing because competition forces innovation which benefits everyone. I am going to download the beta and give it a shot inside of VMWare which supposedly will support Windows 7 inside of a virtual machine.

In other Microsoft news, it is apparent just how bad XBox has been killing the Playstation 3 in the market. Sony has refused to lower prices when the Wii and XBox is so much cheaper, and not too many people care about Blu-Ray at this point. I think the Playstation 3 has a graphical advantage, but in terms of game play, integration, network capability the XBox really shines. I hooked up Netflix streaming to my 360 and while the lack of title availability is a turn off, the technology is there and it worked great.