Microsoft To Switch Focus To Windows 8 In July 2010 374
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by
CmdrTaco
from the someday-they'll-fix-xp dept.
from the someday-they'll-fix-xp dept.
An anonymous reader noted a bit from Ars saying Microsoft will be switching internal focus from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in fiscal year 2010. Microsoft's fiscal year starts in July, which is only eight months away. According to Microsoft's roadmaps, the release of Windows 8 is scheduled for 2012."
Re:Timed with corporate PC replacement cycles... (Score:3, Informative)
Meh. (Score:1, Informative)
I would love to see Windows adopt an Apple-like schedule of smaller, cheaper updates released on an approximately eighteen month schedule. Of course, corporate customers demand long-term stability. But perhaps every other release could be eligible for long-term support, with an interim consumer version. Back in the 1990s, Windows 9x received a feature upgrade on an approximately yearly basis. (95, 95b, 95c, 98, 98SE) There were not huge five year gaps in which everything stagnated.
There does not seem to be much question about Microsoft's continued intention to rev Windows on a three year cycle. During his PDC talk, Mark Russinovich mentioned both the intention and also the thought that Microsoft has become more organized at achieving it. But the thought that people who write job postings acutally have particularly good insight into Microsoft's intentions, is suspect. The keynotes and talks from the PDC are probably a much better source for anyone who wants to understand Microsoft's plans. They are all freely available online in high quality videos for anyone who wants to watch any of them. No doubt Microsoft hopes there will be some significance to the next version of Windows.
But that release is very unlikely to be anywhere near the most significant Microsoft activity over the next few years. Based on watching a few of the PDC videos, here are a few of my impressions about what some of the more important ones are. There appears to have been a fairly substantial internal realignment that moved the Oslo group (Don Box, Chris Anderson, Doug Purdy, and Chris Sells) into the Sql Server organization. That activity appears focused on the Entity Data Model, achieving industry consensus on core data models for important data domains, and REST based communication protocols and activity processes. Part of the alignment extends to the security work including Windows Identity Foundation and the effort to center future work on security around an Oslo based model of identity. Yet another part of it is Microsoft's focus on its REST and Atom based protocol Open Data Services.
All of this along with Azure will feed into Microsoft's effort to move forward towards a computing environment where computing services are accessed by address in the cloud with no concern about what software operating system they are running on or where the physical machine they are using is located.
Re:Windows 8.. (Score:4, Informative)
What can Windows 8 do that can't be done with Windows 7?
128 bit, I think we heard previously.
Re:Windows 8.. (Score:3, Informative)
Well, not all:
http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729 [debian.org]
Debian is on a 2 year cycle
http://news.opensuse.org/2009/03/05/112-roadmap-and-fixed-release-cycle-for-opensuse/ [opensuse.org]
Suse 8 months
I think Ubuntu and Fedora go for the 6 month, but I doubt 'most' go for 6 mos. I think the average is to attempt an annual release.
Re:Windows 8.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows 8.. (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know which Linux distros your're referring to, but if you mean Ubuntu, yes, it has a release schedule of approximately every six months, but each release is supported for 18 months. These are more for casual use. The LTS versions are the 'major new versions' and are intended for large deployments: they're supported for a minimum of 3 years. FWIW, following the Ubuntu release cycle as it's intended, the last 'major new version' was 8.04 'Hardy Heron' released on April of 2008. The next LTS version will not be released until April of next year, and it's code name is 'Lucid Lynx' (which I think is very, very likely to get nicknamed 'XLynx' for obvious reasons. ;)
Summary fiscal year incorrect (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Windows 8.. (Score:3, Informative)
openSUSE used to be a 6 month window. I think Mandriva still uses a 6 month window.
If you only count community distros, then Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Mandriva are the heavy hitters. Debian would be the exception.
However, this is a poor comparison to Windows. Windows wants you to pay money for the upgrade. Linux releases quicker, but it is a free upgrade. Many of these are more comparable to a Windows service pack.
If you count commercial distros like SLES and Red Hat, you'll see a much longer window between releases. These are more comparable to Windows releases.
Re:Which version will Windows 8 be? (Score:3, Informative)
Depends how much of a service pack it is. XP->Vista made some pretty big kernel changes, enough to justify the version. Vista->7 really didn't change anything much, so it's like a service pack.
Isn't XP SP2/3 Windows 5.1?
Essentially, it depends how ambitious they are.
Re:Windows 8.. (Score:5, Informative)
So going to 128 bits wouldn't help?
Addressing DRAM is not the problem 128-bits is being considered for.
128-bit addressing is being considered right now for the off chance that a technology like PRAM [wikipedia.org] catches-on. Once you have non-volatile RAM at much higher densities than typical DRAM, you can ditch the hard drive altogether.
This poses a problem, because disks and SSDs are currently I/O mapped and accessed via an SATA controller, which adds latency. But what people don't realize is how much memory-map space this arrangement saves us: consider that you can access TERABYTES of data in a device that requires less than 100MB of your memory map. And you don't typically care about the added latency, because the speed of disks is many orders of magnitude slower than DRAM.
Now, imagine the disk is replaced by something just as capacious, but also just as fast as DRAM. PRAM in the capacities to rival a hard disk would likely need to be direct memory-mapped I/O to achieve good performance, and for that we really need to consider 128-bit addressing, because current hard disks (single disk and storage arrays) are already pushing those respective 40 and 52-bit limits.
Missed something (Score:4, Informative)
But Windows 8 will solve all those problems, and be faster and more secure!