“There’s never been more hardware capable of running a new OS,” Mark Relph, senior director of the Windows Ecosystem Team, said in a media pre-briefing before the Windows 7 launch. “The compatibility side of things was so important this time around. The universe of products and systems has never been this big for us.”

Microsoft can take hope in data produced by a number of research firms over the past few weeks, suggesting that Windows 7 will drive a generalised tech refresh through 2010. Until the sales numbers come back, though, it is likely too soon to tell whether Microsoft has escaped entirely from the shadow of the recession and the ghost of Windows Vista.