Last week's release of Windows 7 had Microsoft Corp. executives from CEO Steve Ballmer on down confident that this version of Windows is everything Vista wasn't.

The launch of Windows 7 followed by two months the release of Apple's latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard." The latter mainly focused on under-the-hood technologies, and Apple went out of its way to promise no major obvious changes. Snow Leopard, which looks just like its predecessor except for a few UI tweaks, is supposed to provide a solid foundation for future technologies and hardware.

Microsoft, in many ways, took a similar tack with Windows 7. Following on the heels of the much-unloved Vista, focusing on the basics made sense. Windows users, like Mac users, want an operating system that works.

Fair warning: I come to Windows as a Mac user by nature and background -- I've worked with Macs for 17 years, although as an IT professional, I've had more than my fair share of time with Windows machines. Put simply: As an IT professional, I work on whatever hardware is in front of me.

In recent months, Windows 7 has been praised for righting many of Vista's wrongs. Back in August,Computerworld's Preston Gralla offered his own take on the two operating systems. Preston, who leans toward the Windows side of things, evaluated them both and declared a tie.

With that in mind, I took Windows 7 out for a spin recently, focusing on its updated user interface, general usability, stability and performance over several weeks.

It goes almost without saying that the release of Windows 7 is important for Microsoft to stem the tide of customer dissatisfaction with Vista, which has been extremely damaging to the Microsoft brand, and has caused it to lose users to both the Macintosh and Linux. Vista has been a boon for Apple because most of its growth has come from dissatisfied Windows users. (To be precise, this is a phenomenon mostly limited to the United States and other wealthy Western nations which can afford profit margins that would make a loan shark jealous.)

At the same time, ironically, a new release of Windows doesn't matter as much as it used to. In the days before the web became so dominant, Microsoft would rally its software partners to ship new versions to be compatible with, and take advantage of, the features offered by the new release. (Windows 95 was about moving the industry to 32-bits. Windows XP was about moving the industry to the NT kernel.)

Some say that Microsoft is just a marketing company, but the fact that customers were unhappy with Vista proves that it is an engineering company, and when it does a bad job, people notice. If it were just about marketing, they wouldn't have any bad feedback, just as Procter & Gamble never gets any bad reviews of their toothpaste. Similarly, if they were only a marketing company, they wouldn't have made a Windows 7 House Party ad that is so easy to parody. (Warning, rated PG-13.) In fact, to slur Microsoft in this way is to misunderstand them. To pick one random fact, when I joined Microsoft in 1993, they had the same number of developers working on Word as Sun has working on all of OpenOffice today — 20.

The “Killer App” of Linux is the set of apps it contains. Few programs are up to the polish of Firefox today, but many are good enough, and things are progressing nicely given Linux's estimated 2-3% desktop market share. Unlike its competitors, Linux gets better with more users because of its open development model.

I've been using Linux for four years and have seen dramatic improvements, and even the pace of progress increase. In fact, after spending several years researching the topic, I've become as convinced that Linux is the future of computing as that Wikipedia is the future of the encyclopedia. So Windows 7 may slow the bleeding and hurt Apple's stock price, but it won't change the endgame.

Keith Curtis' book, After the Software Wars, is available for download and purchase. Also read this excerpt, How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters.