Difference between revisions of "Windows 7"

Revision as of 16:02, April 26, 2009

Windows Seven (previously known as "Vienna" [formerly known as "Blackcomb"]) is the name for the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, originally announced in February 2000, but has since been subject to major delays such as Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista (which was also delayed by XP SP2). Microsoft has stated that "Seven" should be released in late 2009 or early 2010 (Bill Gates said it could be anywhere between 2009-2010), work on Windows Seven began right after Windows Vista was released. As of May 2007, the name of the operating system used by Microsoft is unknown, though "Windows Seven" was noted in a job posting as a possible working name for the project, and is the only name by which the next version of Windows can currently be called.

Microsoft has declined from discussing details about Windows Seven in public as they focus on the release and selling of Windows Vista, though some early details of a few core operating system features have surfaced at developer conferences such as WHEC in 2006.

History & Development

The codename "Windows Blackcomb" was first assigned to Windows NT 6.0, an operating system that was planned to follow Windows XP. Blackcomb was supposed to be the successor to both Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1) and Windows Server 2003 (Windows NT 5.2). In late 2001 "Blackcomb" was said to be scheduled for release in 2005 then in August it was announced that a minor intermediate release, codenamed Windows "Longhorn", would release in 2002 to update the Windows NT 5.x line. In the years that followed "Longhorn" was transformed to include many features previously promised for "Blackcomb" and became Windows NT 6, and was given a name, Windows Vista. The codename "Blackcomb" was eventually discarded, however the ideas and features behind "Blackcomb" that were not included in Windows Vista got a new name codename Windows "Vienna". At the present, Windows Vista's successor (Windows Seven) is being planned as both a client and server release with a current shipping date of late 2009 - early 2010.

Focus

Sources in Microsoft have stated that Windows Seven will not just be a major change to Windows, but a complete departure from the way users today usually think about using a computer. For example, the "Start" and "Taskbar" philosophy, introduced in Windows 95, might be replaced by a "new interface" that was said in 1999 to be scheduled for Windows Seven ("Vienna"). 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 is planning to release 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 had planned for Vista to include a number of big changes to Windows, including a new file system (WinFS) and a completely new user interface, but after Windows XP was hit by huge worm outbreaks in 2003, Microsoft moved almost all of its entire engineering team 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."

Windows Vista shipped about 2-3 years after XP SP2, and Windows Seven is estimated to take around 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 is going to be the best new feature in Windows 7?

Ben Fathi said, 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."