Windows 7

Windows Seven (formerly known as Vienna [formerly known as Blackcomb]) is the name for a future version of Microsoft Windows, originally announced in February 2000, but has since been subject to major delays such as Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista. Microsoft has announced it will be released in 2009, and according to "Smart Computing In Plain English", a technology magazine, work on it began right after Windows Vista was released. As of February 2007, the name of the operating system used internally is undisclosed and is not used publicly by Microsoft, though "Windows 7" has been noted in job postings as a working name for the project, and is the only name by which the next version of Windows can currently be called.

Microsoft has refrained from discussing the details about Windows Seven publicly as they focus on the release and marketing of Windows Vista, though some early details of various core operating system features have emerged at developer conferences such as Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in 2006.

Development

The code name "Blackcomb" was originally assigned to Windows NT 6, an operating system that was planned to follow Windows XP (codenamed "Whistler;" both named after the Whistler-Blackcomb resort). Blackcomb would be the successor to both the desktop/workstation-oriented Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1) and the server-oriented Windows Server 2003 (Windows NT 5.2). In late 2001 the release of Blackcomb was being scheduled for 2005 and in August it was announced that a minor intermediate release, Vista (codenamed "Longhorn" after a bar in the Whistler Blackcomb Resort), would ship in 2002 to update the Windows NT 5.x line. Over the following years Longhorn morphed in fits, starts, and delays to incorporate many of the features promised for Blackcomb and was eventually designated as Windows NT 6. The status of the operating system dubbed "Blackcomb," however, was shrouded in confusion with some reports suggesting that plans for Blackcomb were scrapped while others claiming that it would be the moniker for a server-only Windows 6.x release. More likely, the codename "Blackcomb" was discarded as no longer being in the spirit of its original intent (i.e., to describe Windows NT 6). At the present, Windows Vista's successor (Windows Seven) is being planned as both a client and server release with a current release date of late 2009 - early 2010.

Focus

Internal sources have pitched Windows Seven as not just being a major revision of Windows, but a complete departure from the way users today typically think about interacting with a computer. For instance, the "Start" philosophy, introduced in Windows 95, may be replaced by the "new interface" which was said in 1999 to be scheduled for Windows Seven ("Vienna") (before being moved to Vista and then back again to Windows Seven)^{[Citation Needed]}. While Windows Vista was intended to be an evolutionary release, Windows Vienna is targeted directly at revolutionizing the way users of the product interact with their PCs.

Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek [1], also suggested that the next version of Windows would "be more user-centric.". When asked to clarify what he meant, Gates said:

"That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline."

Shipment

Microsoft plans to deliver Windows Seven by the end of 2009, according to Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division.

Microsoft originally planned for Vista to include a number of radical changes to Windows, including a new file system and a reinvented user interface, but after Microsoft's products were hit by widespread worm outbreaks in 2003, Microsoft moved its entire engineering plan to locking down Windows with the XP SP2 release.

"We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release."

Vista shipped about two-and-a-half years after XP SP2, and Windows Seven is expected to take about the same amount of time, according to Fathi. "You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with, that's a good time frame for refresh." That would put Microsoft's next OS out by the end of 2009.

Features

What will be the best new feature in Windows 7?

According to Ben Fathi, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it, but over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."