Rumour has it that Microsoft is pushing forward Windows 7 for a 2009 release. The first milestone build has supposedly already been shipped to select partners, according to APCMag. They claim to have access to a roadmap for Windows 7, but whether that claim holds any water remains to be seen. The Inq seems to believe APCMag, but that means about as much as a politician’s word, so whether this is anything more than a rumour is difficult to say. CNet has more.
If this is true then I can see people looking back at Windows Vista as the ME of the NT line in terms of product life cycle.
I’m thinking MS had enough bad press with Vista that they intend to get serious about windows deliveries again.
Well, Vista was suppose to be serious too. We’ll see.
True; I remember when Windows XP was released, Bill Gates said they were going to scrap the ‘incrimental release’ scheduled in favour of a 4-5 year delay in favour of a huge release; a massive overhaul of all the components.
Here we are, Windows Vista with some really awesome new technologies – and not a single Microsoft product fully uses those new technologies. You’d think, for example, that they would make Office 2007 Windows Vista only and be the first big native applications to depart from win32 in favour of WinFX/.NET along with the new ‘pillars of Vista’.
Just look for example within the applications that come by default with Windows; you’d think they would port their whole package across to the new API’s and leave the old ones (old API’s) there only for compatibility with old applications – again, they didn’t do that.
So when it comes to third party vendors, when the main operating system vendor doesn’t even get its own applications to use the own frameworks, the bundled applications don’t even use the new frameworks – as a third party I ask myself why I should ‘risk’ the future of my business using new technologies which even Microsoft can’t be bothered utilising.
As for Windows 7 – by the time it happens, Mac OS X will have ZFS booting, and numerous other things – possibly 15-20% marketshare. Linux will be making inroads as wine application support improves, and vendors jump on board to provide at the very least, support for their applications running through wine.
Edited 2008-01-23 03:27 UTC
‘Pillars of Vista’
:B
Nice post.Very insightful.
<blockquote>Linux will be making inroads as wine application support improves, and vendors jump on board to provide at the very least, support for their applications running through wine.
</blockquote>
I don’t think wine is the future of linux. Linux should get rid of wine all together. I mean it’s cool and all to get some win native app to launch on linux, but thats not what developers should strive too. Why should linux try and look and do the same as windows? What makes it different then?
The thing is, there is an open source alternative to (almost) any windows based application, and more and more are coming and getting better with each release. What we need to do, is teach users they have options, and don’t just blindly fall for the ‘you gotta buy win too’ trick.
edit: why does ‘blockquote’ look great in preview and won’t even show it when published?
Edited 2008-01-24 14:36 UTC
Let me go ahead and start holding my breath now!
Roll on 2012 then
.
if it came out next year, people will have XP,Vista and 7 creating more confusion and loosing customers
Dude, when somebody calls me because they have computer problems I’m still likely to see Windows 98. There are still a lot of people running all sorts of old versions of Windows out there.
Don’t try to imagine things to be more homogenous then they really are OK?
I don’t think people will be confused. People seem to be not confused by new ubuntu or fedora every six months, so they should not be confused by new windows every 2-3 years.
What percentage of the “average joe” community uses Fedora / Ubuntu again?
i wish people would get there facts right, this isnt the windows that will be the successor to Vista, its Windows7 Mobile edition
I think you should probably read the article, I think you’ll find they are referring to the successor to Vista, not talking about Mobile, which just happens to be 7 as well…
Is Windows 7 based on XP or Vista?
no, its based on WindowsMe :p
Yes
no.
the whole point, as the name indicates, is a new windows version. there will be other windows versions based on windows 6/vista before windows 7 is released. just like there was a windows2000/xp based on windows 5.
/stone
but, They are starting from the vista codebase. a new major version number does not mean they are creating an entirely new codebase.
Vista was a huge rewrite and is actually pretty good feature wise. If SP1 fixes many of the glitches, then I don’t think you will see people complaining too much about it going forward.
I hope Windows 7 does well and cut out the legacy support stuff.
I doubt it. It’s the familliar legacy stuff that helps Microsoft to keep long their time users. If it’s a totally new OS, people could just as well buy a Mac or, God forbid, install Linux.
That’s not true. MS owns VirtualPC. Only MS can offer near 100% backward compatibility by including images of every single version of Windows ever released. It would be down right incompetent for MS to put even the smallest amount of effort into backward compatibility in the next version of Windows. They should be putting all of there effort into slimming down the bloat, making sure that VirtualPC runs seamless, and making sure that 3D works in VirtualPC.
I don’t expect that to happen, as ‘backward compatibility’ is MS’s excuse for crappy code. Even if the backward compatibility is only so-so.
Virtual PC isn’t the future. MS purchased softricity and that will fix the application mess as it exists today. Windows 7 will enforce good applications or virtualize the apps to prevent bad apps from messing the rest of the system up. I’m not normally a fan of MS but this is a good thing….
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/default.mspx
I think he/she was referring to how Apple ended up dumping classic. They visualized it for a while and eventually all legacy applications were either updated to run under a native toolkit, or replaced by a new product.
I think it was a very good model because it let people keep their legacy stuff but encouraged them to move to more updated software.
Virtualization has severe performance penalties.
You can’t run 3D games *; you have severe limitation on multimedia applications; you require far more memory and CPU power to run the same application; etc.
– Gilboa
* In theory, the PCI-E protocol does support device virtualization – but AFAIK, the support for this feature (both hardware and software) is severely lacking.
I don’t believe the PCI sig has finalized PCI-E IOV (I\O Virtualization) yet. I know it is close, I wouldn’t expect to see shipping solutions until later this year and then it will be for the enterprise market. The initial focus will be for 10Gig-E and Fibre Channel cards and a lot of focus on multi-root pci to have a truly high end virtualization solution without the I\O penalties. NetXen is shipping a 10Gig-E future proof card and they have an excellent white paper on PCI-E IOV and Multi-Root PCI-E
http://www.netxen.com/technology/whitepapers.html#cd
I would think it would have the opposite effect.Since more users have left Windows because of the cumbersome nature of Vista due to legacy support.
Have you seen any figures that support that?
The most important factor to keep people from switching to another platform is that they need to run the same set of programs to access their data that they have accumulated over many years.
There is virtualization that can help you with that but then you still have all or at least most of the problems of old fashioned windows, just at a slower speed. Virtualization is also available on Mac and Linux so that wouldn’t give a brave new Windows much of an advantage.
Linux usage have increased more than any time in the history of its creation within the last two years.Thats pretty much common knowledge.I am not saying it has taken over the world but it has been receiving alot of press recently thanks to the likes of Mark Shuttleworth.No I am not an Ubuntu fanboy.
Then they will stick to what they know as much as possible so as long the hardware is capable.Look how many people still use Windows 98.People still requesting XP on their new machines.Why is that ? Not just backwards compatibility but people are realising why shell out all that money for a new hardware /software platform to do the same thing they can for considerably less money.If they are not satisfied either way they are willing to switch and some have.
I can agree with you there since alot of average users wont use virtualization since its a worry that they wont even try installing an alternative operating system on their own much less any one in a virtual machine.
I dont think that is true either.
If people did move to other platforms, why do you think they would move back to Windows 7 ?
Once bitten etc etc
Sound logic but from observing the fickle nature of human beings sometimes,what monkey see monkey do.If Windows 7 is technically on par with the alternatives, people will consider moving back to it since they will still have the bulk of the mind share from being ubiquitous on the desktop.
Would love to see the registry removed. This causes so many issues and eventually leads to the slow down of your PC because there are always ghost entries left when uninstalling and reinstalling software over time.
Once they do this I may return to the Windows family till then I’ll stick with Linux or OS X. When I get home at night I want to be able to enjoy my computing experience.
registry slows down your PC? let me know when to stop laughing,
clearly, you have not got a clue.
You can’t really get _rid_ of the registry; it’s been around forever, and you could easily say that 99% of Windows applications rely heavily on it.
I agree with the first comment; if Win7 is to come out so soon, then Vista will be much like ME in that it was succeeded in a rather short amount of time.
Was this planned all along? Who knows. It’s just surprising, though, because we all heard _so_ much hullabaloo about Vista and how it would be the biggest change since 3.x -> 95, and now MS, *apparently*, is just going to come out with another release before Vista has really made any real progress.
I guess we have to wait and see what they do with this new Windows. It makes me wonder why they are announcing this now, since it may slow adoption of Vista even further and dampen the sale of new computers.
Are they just giving up on Vista entirely? Why not further refine Vista? What gives? Vista has problems, but is it that hopeless? More frequent, smaller, incremental improvements might be preferable. Seems strange to me.
I guess time will tell.
If I recall correctly, Microsoft can work on more than one project at once (windows, office, hardware, live, etc). The windows team was only seven thousand-ish people out of eighty thousand employees a few years back; they might very well have seperate groups for vista polishing and windows 7.
EDIT: Unless you meant they should do an OS X style thing for several major releases, in which case who knows. What little we have heard sounds like they’re making some low level changes though.
Edited 2008-01-23 04:57 UTC
No one’s making any announcements. This is just rumormongering from tech sites. No release dates have been announced and the milestone that was delivered to various partners is just the first out of a multi-milestone product.
The difference between ME and Vista was that ME was a dead-end of a line that had run its course. Win7 is being built on Vista, since Vista is actually a pretty good foundation.
Shows how much you know…
I got my blueprint in the post this morning, I expect the discs in the next few days.
It will be based on NT code, not Vista.
So, it looks like all the question dodging Bill Gates has been doing over the last month or so about improving Vista, and delfecting onto Windows 7 has been preparing the groundwork for this.
I would say that Vista is officially now a flop.
And that saddens me, I loved Longhorn. Microsoft seriously needs to look at replacing Mr Ballmer.
Where’d you get that? Everything I read said they started with Vista and stripped out everything they could as a starting point.
BTW, Vista is NT code. NT > 2000 > XP > Vista. Surely you’re not suggesting they went back to NT 4 code?
Edited 2008-01-23 15:29 UTC
Well, technically, it actually goes like this:
NT > 2000 > XP > 2003 > Vista > 2008. For me, 2003 is still king.
But I’m in annoying nitpick mode
.
exactly !
I think you’ll like 2008 a lot too. I have a feeling you’re a fan of more of a minimalistic setup that you then customize, so 2008 will be the one for you.
I think raver31 is just pulling my leg or attempting to get my goat
.
Just like Vista was supposed to be XP SP3…
just like OS X 10.0 was a major step taken by Apple, the code base change of Vista allows for incremental improvements with a cleaner base to work off of.
I think some benchmarking magazine actually stuffed the registry full of random entries and didn’t find much of a performance degradation. I’m not sure why you let the registry bother you that much. Sure, there are problems with it, but I don’t think performance is the most serious one.
the registry can become corrupted which is harder for a plain text file.
Two questions:
1) Have you ever seen the actual structure of the registry get corrupted in Win2k, XP, or Vista (discounting cases where the hard drive itself is catastrophically failing)?
2) What makes a text file, which is just as much a bag o’ bytes as the Registry Hives, less susceptible to those things that cause corruption?
FYI, the registry is a journalled data store and the keys vital to system bootup are backed up into a separate set of files (this is what allows the “last known good configuration” option).
I doubt they will give up on Vista … Windows 7 will be Vista sp3, and more likely they will be closer to what they envisioned Vista too look like in the first place 🙂
ohh modded down, did fanboy not like the anti vista jibe? should i have compared it to sp2 ? lol …
Just remember that only half of what is in the roadmap will actually be deliverred.
Remember, one reason Vista sucked so bad in ’07 is because hardware vendors took a pass and quite a few are still waiting for SP1 (which will not any difference in Vista’s performance). The API will change to an extent, and compared to the steady, incremental advance of GNU/Linux, I don’t see hardware vendors signing up to waste a lot of time on Win7.
In other words, call me when Win7-SP1 is released.
Edited 2008-01-23 09:38 UTC
Microsoft has NOT announced anything!
So, please stop speaking about “flop” (Vista has sold twice XP), stop skeaking about “win7” (Microsoft has not announced anything, Win7 does NOT exist!).
All news about Win7 are pure FUD!
Edited 2008-01-23 17:07 UTC
http://www.windows7screenshots.com/
Well, we KNOW those are fake, not only because the screenshots on at least one says “Internet Exploder” and another says “Vista XP,” but also because we know that 7 bears the Aero theme.
Here are some real screenshots (reportedly):
http://www.thinknext.net/archives/2124