Windows 7 Is Released

Microsoft released Windows 7 on October 22, 2009, at retail prices of $119.99 (Home Premium), $199.99 (Professional), and $219.99 (Ultimate) — with launch edition upgrade pricing of $49.99 for Home Premium available through the summer pre-sale. Windows 7 RTM (Release to Manufacturing) had been signed off on July 22, 2009 as build 7600.16385, available to OEM partners in August and to MSDN/TechNet subscribers before the retail launch. The release came 34 months after Windows Vista’s consumer release (January 30, 2007), which had been criticized heavily: Vista’s User Account Control dialog appeared 4–6 times during a typical session (Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads dramatized this repeatedly), hardware requirements were high (1 GB RAM minimum, 2 GB practical), driver compatibility was poor at launch (printer and scanner drivers in particular broke badly), and early versions had performance regressions on the hardware typical at the time of release. Windows 7 kept Vista’s underlying architecture — NT 6.1 kernel (Vista was NT 6.0), WDDM 1.1 graphics driver model, BitLocker, Windows Defender — but fixed the UAC behavior to prompt far less frequently (background configuration changes by administrators no longer triggered prompts), reduced minimum memory requirements, and benefited from three years of Vista driver maturation in the hardware ecosystem.

The visible changes were significant: the Superbar replaced the Windows XP/Vista taskbar with a combined launcher and window switcher — pinned application icons showed thumbnail previews and Jump Lists (right-click for recently opened files and common actions) on hover, and running applications could show multiple window thumbnails from a single taskbar button. Aero Snap (drag a window to the left or right screen edge to tile it at exactly half-screen; drag to the top to maximize) gave mouse-based window management a keyboard shortcut dimension (Win+Left/Right/Up/Down). Aero Peek (hover the taskbar’s show-desktop button to see all window frames transparent) previewed all open windows. Libraries created virtual aggregated folder views that combined contents from multiple actual paths (Music Library combining My Music and a NAS share, for example). HomeGroup simplified home network file and printer sharing to a password exchange rather than workgroup/permission configuration. Windows 7 also added native support for multi-touch touchscreens (Windows Touch) in anticipation of tablet hardware, though tablet PCs with Windows 7 preceded the iPad-driven touchscreen revolution by only months.

Microsoft sold 90 million Windows 7 licenses in the first six months of availability — the fastest-selling Windows version to that point — and 40% of all Windows PCs were running Windows 7 by the end of 2010. The Windows XP installed base (which remained stubbornly large because many enterprise users had skipped Vista) began declining as Windows 7 proved reliable enough for enterprise deployment: unlike Vista, which many large organizations had actively tested and declined to deploy, Windows 7 saw rapid enterprise adoption. Dell, HP, and Lenovo had continued selling Windows XP downgrade rights through Vista’s era; most shifted to Windows 7 as the default OEM OS within months of the October 2009 launch. Windows 7 peak market share reached approximately 54% of the global Windows installed base in 2012 and remained above 50% through 2014 — a dominance that made Windows 8 (October 2012) a difficult sell and contributed to the enterprise resistance that eventually led Microsoft to provide free Windows 10 upgrades (July 2015). Extended support for Windows 7 ran through January 14, 2020, when it reached end-of-life after over a decade.