Windows 7 is not only a “good enough” operating system, it is so much better an OS and user experience that Apple will have to think hard before using the same advertising tactics that worked so well on Vista. The differences in the Windows 7 and Mac OS X platforms from a usability standpoint are pretty much nil.

Here are the five reasons Apple fears Windows 7:

Clean and Simple User Experience. There is now very little difference between the easy user experience on Windows 7 and Mac OS X. Gone from Windows 7 are Vista’s loads of unnecessary bloatware applications, confusing and poorly designed configuration dialog boxes, and moronic UAC popups that impeded a user’s productivity at every turn. The new task bar is more simple and straightforward than Mac OS X’s crowded icon bar.

Mac Crashes More. Fact is, Windows 7 systems don’t crash … ever. Those days of frequent Windows Explorer crashes went away when one installed the Windows 7 RC.  Mac now crashes more often.

Flexibility and Lower Cost. Microsoft has updated its “PC hunter” commercials but they still show how easy it is to find a better value when buying a Windows PC over a Mac.

Performance. We may not have side-by-side Windows 7 and Mac OS X performance comparisons yet but Windows 7 isn’t the performance hog Vista was. Windows 7 tools are fast, applications don’t freeze up waiting for resources, disk I/O performance is great, memory utilization is much more efficient. Startup, shutdown and sleep are fast.

Mac Security Is NOT Better Than Windows 7. Many still live with the myth that Mac OS X doesn’t have any security issues while Windows does. That myth ignores the facts. While it is true that Windows is still a much larger security target because of it’s market share, it isn’t true that the Mac doesn’t have plenty of security issues of its own.

An extract from NetworkWorld.