Windows 7 To Be Released Next Year?

KrispySausage writes "A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would seem to be at least partially verified by news of a milestone build available for review by an anonymous third party." We've previously discussed the upcoming new OS version, as well as its danger to Vista.

windows7

[wwmedia]

itll probably end up being a minor change, Vista SP2 with new name?

they are taking a leadt out off Apples book again, "release often and charge alot for overglorified service packs"

Vista's missing features

[Enderandrew]

1 - Microsoft says they learned from their mistakes, and have been deconstructing Windows to remove bloat, and make the whole thing run faster. Windows Server can even run sans-GUI now, and they're building up from a minimalist stack. This is a really good thing.

2 - There were some neat concepts that were promised with Vista and never delivered, like the file abstraction stack, or WinFS. Now they might have time to do it right.

3 - Vista was a total bomb. There is no denying it at all. So why bother? Admit your mistake and move on quickly. All in all, this sounds like a surprisingly smart move on their part.

Such optimism?

[Richard.g.k]

Hopefully it will end up being like windows ME -> windows XP, with vista being ME, and the new OS representing XP. Contrary to peoples constant whining, vista is a reasonable enough O/S, the only problem i've seen with it is the resource intensiveness. Rarely do i ever have crash problems. But this will turn into another 300 comment microsoft hate-o-thon just because of story that is an unverified RUMOR about an operating system that nobody responding has even SEEN yet.

two thoughts

[techpawn]

ME was out HOW long before the next OS?

and WIN98 SE maybe this is Vista SE...As long as they cut some bloat and give me back admin controls in less than convoluted places, I'm cool.

Me 2!!!oneone!!one!

[EnsilZah]

This strengthens the impression that Vista is the second iteration of Windows Me which was also replaced by a new OS rater quickly (about a year) after being found to suck donkey balls.

Re:Vista's missing features

[rbochan]

1 - Microsoft says they learned from their mistakes, and have been deconstructing Windows to remove bloat, and make the whole thing run faster. Windows Server can even run sans-GUI now, and they're building up from a minimalist stack. This is a really good thing.

Be realistic, remove bloat? This is Microsoft you're talking about.


2 - There were some neat concepts that were promised with Vista and never delivered, like the file abstraction stack, or WinFS. Now they might have time to do it right.

They've been promising stuff like this since the NT 3.5 days. I'd consider that plenty of time to deliver.


3 - Vista was a total bomb. There is no denying it at all. So why bother? Admit your mistake and move on quickly. All in all, this sounds like a surprisingly smart move on their part.

Has Microsoft ever admitted to making a mistake?

Call me skeptical, but experience does teach an individual.

I figured this would happen

[darkvizier]

Microsoft may have blundered, but they're not dumb. I'm pretty sure they wrote Vista in such a way that it's extensible. So people didn't like Vista, so what? Some people have paid for it, enough at least that they've gotten feedback on how to polish it up. Then they release their next OS, and life goes on. One product failure is not enough to kill MS.

Re:Such optimism?

[Enderandrew]

Problems with Vista include:

* UAC - annoying and not remotely secure. People will be trained to always click yes, or just disable it. Further more, it prevented me from installing legit software, and copying files in certain directories.
* Drivers - People say an OS is only as good as the software for it, and I'd argue an OS is only as good as the drivers. If you can't support your hardware, then software isn't even an issue. Now all drivers MUST be signed, yet many signed drivers don't work very well, if at all. I think it would be a good idea to have all drivers in one central repository (like the Linux kernel) so you won't have to worry about tracking down drivers for old hardware, but make sure the drivers work. And here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense.
* Design for productivity, and not looks. Sexy is sexy, and we all like sexy things. In the long run however, I want my computer to enable me to work, not prevent me from doing so. Usability studies have shown that Vista's UI slows people down performing the same tasks. Scrolling in the Start Menu? Again, the writing was on the wall here. Look at the UI changes in Windows Media Player, and you'll see a program that has become less user friendly, while prettier. Why should we expect Vista to be different?
* Performance is piss-poor. Again, people like fast computers. Installing Vista is just a bad decision.
* Vista's worst enemy is not OS X or Linux (as much as I love me some Linux). Vista's worst enemy is XP, which post-SP1 has been a pretty decent OS. For the end user, Vista provides no real benefits or new features besides better looks, while slowing your PC down considerably. And with projects like the Vista Transformation Pack, you can make XP look like Vista. Why would someone want Vista?

Re:Vista's missing features

[draevil]

I found it hard to continue reading your post after point 1 began with "Microsoft says". As you rightly point out in point 2, MS-says with respect to what we-got in Vista didn't quite match up. MS promised a lot and users got an OS that felt to many like a regression.

MS has a habit of "promising" features that it doesn't know how to deliver; its useful if you want to discourage investment in potential competitors. After all, why go and develop a new fs technology if the company with a 90%+ monopoly in the OS sector is going to integrate it into their product?

"Windows 7" will be an incremental change to Vista with some bug fixes and a desire to gain a better image in the market than the ironically sullied Vista has. How can MS develop features in less than 1 year that they couldn't manage to make in 4?

Re:Marketing Slogan

[Daimanta]

This is EXACTLY how they approach sales. They say the previous version sucked in certain aspects and swear that this version is going to be über.

And we all know how that ends out.

Re:windows7

[BECoole]

itll probably end up being a minor change, Vista SP2 with new name?

Hopefully more like Windows XP SP4.

This is fake, mod article down (*sigh*)

[A Friendly Troll]

If someone only bothered to spend two more minutes investigating...

Windows Seven with a build number of 6.1.6519.1? The Windows Seven that is currently in the kernel-only, text mode, MinWin phase?

This was probably some kind of a Vista SP2 build, something that will be released next year and is in heavy development. That, or the guy was given a modded/themed current version of Vista and was fooled.

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[martinmcc]

Indeed, that is a ridiculous number to boast about. That is not much under 512 MB, which many machines out there are still using. If you have 2 Gigs, which should be more than plenty for an average desktop system, then 1/4 of the memory is used before you even do anything. It just emphasises that there is no such thing as a windows upgrade, it just expands to fill the resources available (much like a fart in a room). Personally, when I have a 2Ghz Dual core 64Bit system with 4GB of RAM on my desktop, I want it to be _slightly_ more responsive than the 8Mhz 8086 system with 640 KB I started my PC experience on.

Re:windows7

[colmore]

Nah, if they were going to copy Apple, they'd also needlessly break backwards compatibility.

I like Macs, best UI stuck on a Unix out there, but there's a lot to hate about the cult and what it gets away with.

Re:windows7

[stanleypane]

Save for the fact that a full release of OS X is only $130.00 retail. It makes it a little easier to swallow than the $399 for Vista Ultimate.

It's W7 v Linux Open Source

[MacarooMac]

With free open source platforms such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu offering increasingly sophisticated 'windows style' desktop environments, more configurability and faster release cycles I can quite see why MS is becoming paranoid over the sucession of bloatware they continue to offer to the home desktop market.

Your average home user is now in a position to purchase even a mid-range PC for £500 which probably offers more document management and multimedia capabilities then they will probably need; typically just browsing, email, IM, media play/record, DTP etc.
Persuading this market of the *additional benefit* of upgrading, firstly to Hasta la Vista and, apparently quite soon, to Windows 7, will be a tought sell.

IMO, unless MS or another software vendor comes up with a so-called "killer applicaton" in the mean time, that will only run on the latest MS OS platform (though I think MS7 will still be 32 bit?) or only on a high spec hardware (forcing said user to upgrade their PC to a new one pre-loaded, of course, with the new MS OS!), then how, exactly, MS intend to market this new OS any better than Vista is beyond me.

FYI, I've been dual booting Vista and Linux K/Ubuntu for a few months now and, aside for some driver issues, the Linux environment has not compromised my core usability in any significant way, though clearly some tweaking - which would generally be beyond the level of (and undesirabe to) the mainstream home market - is still currently required.
But as the open source OS market continues to grow, how does MS intend to combat this threat?
By speeding up their own release cycles, of course, in desperate attempts to quickly copy and match the latest OS functionality and UI gimmicks already freely available on the rival platforms!

Re:windows7

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey MODS:

How is this speculation Informative??
Interesting, maybe...
ugh.

Re:Marketing Slogan

[n0-0p]

Congrats on being the first (and so far only) person to get this right; the only thing missing is dates. In my opinion, the dates show parallels between 2K -> XP and Vista -> Windows 7. There was about a year and a half between 2K and XP releases, with XP initially just adding polish and tweaks to smooth out the major architectural changes of 2K. It also gave time for a compatible driver base to get established. In the end this resulted in much better uptake for XP than 2K. Maybe they're shooting for a similar scenario.

Re:windows7

[randyest]

Don't be silly. Of course Time Machine isn't like Shadow Volume Copy; Time Machine requires an additional hard drive to save the backup (mirror, really.) It's more like RAID0 in that respect. Only slower.

Re:windows7

[GregPK]

I disagree, I believe that they are learning from thier mistakes and the realization that Apple is taking away thier market share very quickly has been a swift kick in the pants to get the latest release out.

The normal Microsoft Propaganda.

[Vellmont]

So Microsoft has basically admitted that Vista is a flop, market wise. So what do they do? Announce a successor Real Soon Now.

They know they can't possibly get anything worth a damn out that quickly.. but that's not the goal here. The goal is to stave anyone figuring they might as well think about switching to Linux or OSX, cuz "Microsoft is going to fix Windows Real Soon Now".

In reality the product will actually be released in the middle of 2010. It may be good, it may be another bomb. How long can Microsoft keep up the "But the next one is going to be just GRRREEAAAT!"? Stay tuned...

Re:Such optimism?

[alan_dershowitz]

I don't think the driver complaint is fair because there HAS been support for modular drivers since Windows 2000 via WDM. Hardware makers are just releasing terrible drivers. It took a really long time for hardware makers to start supporting WDM, and it really didn't catch on until they were forced to when XP became the OEM standard. I had a Kensington webcam that had promised Win2K/XP support, then after a year they rescinded their beta driver while blaming Microsoft for making drivers too hard to write. In reality what they meant was that they couldn't just belt out a crappy single-layer driver and be done with it.

On the MSDN blogs there have been developer conversations detailing why it's difficult to near-impossible to get hardware makers to follow the rules for making good drivers. In at least one case a video card maker intentionally wrote in code to cheat WHQL testing so their hardware would run in an extremely cut-down mode to pass quality testing, but it would have been impossible for Microsoft to PROVE this was intentional. So basically hardware makers write crappy drivers that crash and people blame it on Microsoft.

Video has always been in ring 0, so it's always going to have the chance to bring down the system. That's really unavoidable if you don't want to sacrifice some speed for safety.

Re:windows7

[Anonymous Coward]

"Point OS X releases include new features and updates old ones, while MS Service packs do neither of those. Service packs are just bundles of all the security updates since the last service pack."

XPSP2? NTSP3?

Re:windows7

[ShieldW0lf]

Personally, I'll be avoiding anything touched by Microsoft going forward. There are Trusted Computing vulnerabilities built into my hardware now, so the risks have definitely become too great. That goes for Novell as well, of course. Simply can't be trusted.

Re:windows7

[Njovich]

I think you're right in saying that you can't compare Windows Service Packs to Mac OS X releases. However, your further statements about this puzzle me.

Point OS X releases include new features and updates old ones, while MS Service packs do neither of those. Service packs are just bundles of all the security updates since the last service pack.

IMHO that's not true. Windows XP SP2 added a whole range of new features (for instance in the wireless networking area), and other service packs have done so too.

Point OS X releases are more akin to Ubuntu LTS releases or something along those lines.

Ubuntu LTS releases generally have very few new features. Something like the Leopard release wouldn't be an LTS release. Als, there is no real equivalent for repositories in Mac OS, making comparisons about releases hard.

Service packs don't even mean anything anymore to the consumer because of the improvements to the automatic rollout of updates in windows.

Ok, where is your source on that one? Any citation? Windows XP SP2 meant a lot to consumers AFAIK.

Not this shit again

[Bertie]

Man, Microsoft have been doing this for as long as I can remember. "Yeah, OK, you got us, this version stinks to high heaven, but we'll nail it next time, just you wait and see. Don't go running off to the competition, 'cos you'll only be sorry when you see what we've got in store just round the corner." This time they're starting the rumour mill extra-early, well before any sign of an announcement, presumably because Vista's gone down like a turd in a hot tub.

And then one by one the whiz-bang features they promised at the time of announcing the product disappear, and it turns up late and full of bugs.

Every time.

Sad thing about it is that people still fall for it.

Every time.

Why? How many times do you need to be disappointed by them before you decide that enough's enough? I swear, it's like an abusive marriage. They're the drunken husband in the string vest - they beat you up, then they promise you they love you and they'll change, only for it to happen again. And again. And again. And you, the battered wife, are convinced you're lost without them.

Seriously, folks, pack your bags and get out of there. He's a brute and he'll beat you again. Because you let him.

Re:windows7 Speaking of Defragging...

[davidsyes]

Why does Vista STILL require defragging. We hear that Linux doesn't NEED defragging because it smartly places files. Why can't microsoft eliminate this part of the market. If they aren't, just for the sake of cottage defragging companies, then aren't such companies vampires and saws and such?

http://cbbrowne.com/info/defrag.html [cbbrowne.com]

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-newbie/58320-disk-defragmentation.html [linuxforums.org]

This one challenges Novell's reply:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/qna/15032.html [novell.com]

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting [oneandoneis2.org]

(Oh, BTW, just heard now 17:05 local PST, Yahoo! is scheduled to layoff numerous employees, but it's about 19hour old:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/technology/22yahoo.html?bl&ex=1201150800&en=0019b93b4bb1c219&ei=5087 [nytimes.com]

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/Business/Downsizing_and_Layoffs/ [yahoo.com]

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