Windows 7 in the Next Year?

Microsoft's efforts to get businesses to adopt Vista may come to a screeching halt now that Bill Gates has announced "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version", referring to Windows 7, the next expected version of the company's flagship desktop operating system.With a new version available soon, many organizations may decide to wait and see if they can avoid the pain of a Vista rollout altogether.

I find that hard to believe

Next year? they haven't even started beta yet have they?

Re:I find that hard to believe

Of course it won't be ready by then. They'll keep putting the date back. But they hope that if they keep saying it's almost ready, businesses won't get impatient and migrate to Linux.

Re:I find that hard to believe

It's a marketing ploy. They are trying to say to the world "ok we screwed up, look were already making a better one". By making it seem like they quickly fixed the "Vista" bug, it gives their consumers more confidence.

Re:I find that hard to believe

Isn't that what Vista SP1 was supposed to be? Folks have been getting Vista on new computers and some poor saps even bought it off store shelves. I know better than to get a MS OS before at least a year and a service pack or two. Many do not. Releasing the next version as quickly as possible rather than fixing or replacing what people already paid for does not inspire consumer confidence. (Kinda like how they handled Windows ME . . .)

Re:I find that hard to believe

Has anyone noticed a pattern here? Microsoft seems to screw an OS every other release: Windows 95, great! Windows 98, not so great. Windows 98SE, great! Windows ME, disaster! Windows XP, great! Windows Vista, disaster!

Will "Vista Reloaded" be again a hit?! I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

Re:I find that hard to believe

2000, something new, not completely ready XP, getting better Vista, try too much and completely fail

• NT4 , something new, not completely ready
• 2000, mostly everything fixed
• XP, try a little too much and fail
• Vista, try way too much, fail completely

TFTFY

+1 Insightful

This announcement is all about keeping up momentum and stopping people from looking elsewhere.

OF COURSE it won't be released next year, or even the year after. They'll want to "get it 100% right this time".

Re:I find that hard to believe

The way microsoft changes everything as far as administration goes I'm surprised the admins haven't revolted yet. You have to relearn, and recertify every time a new release comes out. With Linux, different distros have different GUIs for admin tasks, but that's just GUI. You can do everything for admin from the command line, and nothing has really changed much in the last 15 years.

Microsoft: "The whole world is our beta tester."

Bill Gates: "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version".

Quoting the parent comment: "Next year? they haven't even started beta yet have they?"

You are forgetting what appears to be a core Microsoft philosophy: "The whole world is our beta tester."

The problem with Vista is that buyers are becoming technically knowledgeable enough that they don't want to be beta testers of a very unfinished product that requires them to buy more powerful hardware. Remember that Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released only 3 years ago. Before that was 3 years during which every Windows XP customer was a beta tester of a very unfinished product that didn't even handle USB very well.

Sometimes it seems to me that Microsoft is not primarily a software company that is abusive, but an abuse company that sells software as a method of delivering abuse.

Remember that a "new version" can be as little as moving the menus around and causing everyone a lot of annoyance, as Microsoft did with IE 7. There should be a song, "50 ways to abuse the customer."

The end comes soon, and Microsoft is trying to delay the end. With XP, most users have all the operating system they want. Except for the built-in susceptibility to malware, Windows XP is acceptable. Customers just want to do their work. They don't sit around all day dreaming about new features of an OS.

For most of Microsoft's customers, there is no need for change, especially when they realize that the Chief of Grief, software's Dr. Death, will quickly declare the death of that version, too, as it tried to do with Windows XP.

Another problem at Microsoft is apparently that the good people have left, and the people who remain are not knowledgeable enough to do the work. Microsoft's employees know the end is near, and the creative programmers have already left. Only those who just want a job remain.

Re:Microsoft: "The whole world is our beta tester.

For printers and some other stuff I often try to avoid running the "installer from the CD", because that usually puts tons of useless crap into your computer.

I usually try to look for the Win2K/XP directory where the "real driver" is stored, and then point windows to it.

If XP gets the wrong driver and you want to rerecognize the stuff again, just go to control panel and delete the relevant "?" stuff in device manager (the question mark icon for the device indicates it's not properly installed etc).

Most times it's the manufacturers who mess things up.

That said, NEVER install hardware drivers from Windows Update.

Breaking API compatibilty...release in 1 year? No.

Didn't we just read that they're breaking binary compatibility with Windows XP/Vista in 7? I laud them for doing this, but the idea that a modular, completely-rethought, bloat-free, and binary incompatible Windows is one year away strikes me as nothing short of absurd. The only cases I can see where both of these facts being correct is either that 7 has been in development for at least three years, or the new item is a steaming pile.

The more likely scenario is that we're being mislead (e.g., the inference that he's talking about Windows 7 is wrong, or that the previous article today regarding binary incompatibility is hogwash).

Re:Breaking API compatibilty...release in 1 year?

Yesterday article about binary incompatibility was just a troll and some fellow slashdotter already pointed to this:
http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2008/04/04/dear-dev-corvin/ [paulbetts.org]
This is a short answer from MS employee. Can't be more clear, because entire article was complete bullshit.

Should we stay or should we go now (to Vista)?

We've been studying Vista at work, and our decision for now (which holds through at least Sepember) is to stick with XP. All the new PCs have Vista installed, and we're downgrading them to XP before deployment to customer's desks. Thank goodness for Microsoft's advancements in deploying XP!

The short story - we certainly don't want 1/3rd XP, 1/3rd Vista, and 1/3rd Win7, and that's what it is looking like when we don our future-hats.

So we decided this week that we'll stay with XP for as long as we can, using the principle that it is less expensive to support XP today, and we have no idea where Vista and Win7 will be. And we'll still have plenty of time to upgrade across the board if MS sticks with their current XP sunset plan.

We'll only start deploying Vista when Microsoft gives us clarity on the Win7 timeline, or when we conclude that Vista support will be less expensive than XP to support, or when we feel that we need to start converting to meet Microsoft's XP retirement plans.

New distribution method for new OS

What is more remarkable than the new version of windows that will be delivered next year is that it will be distributed NOT by boxes of CDs on shop shelves, NOT by pre-installation on hard disks of new machines and NOT EVEN by microsoft update. It will be hand delivered by monkeys flying out of my butt.

Windows Vista, the new ME

Wow. I guess we can just count Vista as stillborn at this point. Oh sure, there's no way 7 will be out next year (try late 2009, most likely late 2010). But Gates announcing 7 that quickly, it's like he was trying to put a stake through Vista's heart.

Hopefully they had a lot of reusable concepts and code that they can leverage. Otherwise, that's an awful waste of code and effort.

Longhorn next year!

This is simply the way MS operates. Windows 7 will be due out next year, for the next 3 years.

It'll be right around the corner, or almost to Beta for at least 2 years, only to have the whole thing scrapped because it's too hard to program anything not NT based.

Nah, not really

they will release it, but it will just be a repackaged version of xp. They probably want to switch back to it without anyone really knowing. It like the "new coke"

Brilliant actually

they will release it, but it will just be a repackaged version of xp. They probably want to switch back to it without anyone really knowing. It like the "new coke"

Brilliant actually. Lets see, you buy a PC at Best Buy and can only get Vista on it. So you go to another shop, and buy a copy of XP and install it. So far a double dip.

Now, next year you shell out more cash and will want to upgrade to Win7. The triple dip, Brilliant.

Re:Nah, not really

I'm not so sure that having all Vista compatible apps also Linux compatible would be the "death sentence" for Microsoft.

If there was a company that made a "professional, commercial" Linux-type OS that could run all Windows programs natively, I'd not only buy 5 copies, but stock in the company.

Hell, I'd tattoo their logo on my neck.

Re:Nah, not really

Then how the hell would he buy 5 copies?

Support the company? Besides, they make great gifts.

Re:I don't think so

They may very well test it a bit longer and delay it a bit in the end just to make sure another vistaesque fiasco doesn't roll out.

I'm not sure "not enough testing" was what made Vista such an unpleasant experience for many of us.

I think it had more to do with problems with design and implementation. Arguably, you could say there are also issues with the overall scope of what MS was trying to accomplish with Vista.

Re:Ground up

Microsoft has enough cash reserves to operate for at least a year without selling a single product. If they focused everything on developing Windows 7, then they might, just, have something in a year.

That's about as likely as getting 9 women to have a baby in one month.

Re:2-3 years is normal for Windows

Vista took that long because they scrapped almost all of their work half-way through, a great example of extraordinarily poor project management. We've seen mention here at Slashdot of the enormous resources poured into just the shutdown screen. They were behind schedule, over budget, and missed their goals to an unacceptable extent, but they had to be able to recoup the investment, so it got pushed out the door.

Meanwhile, Steven Sinofsky was over running the Office 2007 program, which delivered essentially on-time and on-budget, hitting almost all of the goals. (I know a lot of people don't like the interface, but that's a separate point from the project management.) Sinofsky was promoted to oversee Windows development, and inherited the mess left behind by Jim Allchin. The earlier Slashdot article alluding to a complete overhaul of Windows may well be his doing, an attempt to get the focus back where it needs to be in order to not have a fiasco the next time around. We may even finally see the emergence of WFS finally.

Paradigm shifts and evil empires

I've been betting on Google for the next Evil Empire (for one thing, I like the irony), but Apple just might have a shot.

I definitely bet on Google.

See everytime the previous evil empire falls and a new one emerge, we all see a shift in the paradigms f evil empires. It's not a coincidence that an "Evil" empire has become evil. It's because it has become quite efficient at the kind of abuse that are necessary to secure a position, in the "Evil Corp" world. And it won't be easy for a concurrent to replace it in the exact same position. Usually the concurrent replace them by making them irrelevant.

Usually, Evil Corps die in the way of obsolescence. Take the previous old evil empire : IBM.
IBM has achieved a huge monopoly in the market place based on the hardware they were selling.
And they got replaced by Microsoft, which is basically a software company (or an abuse company occasionally selling software as pointed by some /.ers higher in the thread). All this switch happened, because computer got commoditised. During the IBM era, you had to go to IBM to buy specific mainframes. At the end of IBM's kingship you could buy a PC from them, but also buy a PC-compatible from any other nameless vendor from around the world. Wherever you bought your hardware from, you could install your OS (...DOS from Microsoft...) on it. The fact that the hardware was from IBM became irrelevant, hardware didnt' matter anymore.

The current evil empire(tm) is a software empire. And they have built their empire on a ground of software monopoly. You have to buy your OS from them, there are the only one selling Windows. What makes Google the best candidate to be the "Next Evil Empire", is that there a good potential to shift paradigm and make the current software-based busyness model obsolete. Microsoft has a solid ground for a software monopoly, only as long as people need to buy their specific software.
Google isn't a company based around software. It's a company which uses standards instead. What they provide are information services : searches, mails, maps, whatever. And they are bloody good at it because they can leverage a decade long experience in data processing/clustering, a decade worth of data mining, tons of different kind of database that they can cross-reference, etc.
But also, all their application are built around standards : most of their service are web applications built around pretty plain standard-compliant HTML.
Whichever software you have installed on you PC doesn't matter anymore. It could be Windows, it could be Mac OS X, it could be one of the dozen nameless Linux-based distribution. As long as it can display HTML properly, it can work.

The same way Microsoft replaced IBM once the PC became a commodity, the same way Google and similar service providers will replace Microsoft once the OS becomes a commodity.

Also, what make specifically Google a potential Evil Corp among other factor, is that once in place they will be hard to compete against.
IBM secured their position because it was hard at that time for another company to come up with competing hardware.
Microsoft secured its position, because of vendor lock-in, no standard-compliance, being the target of most 3rd party applications, etc. : In the beginning some competitors could pull a competing OS, but it won't see adoption because it wouldn't be compatible with all the applications that the Microsoft users already had.

Google will probably secure its position because of the massive amount of experience and data they can leverage. To be performant as a service providing company, a company will probably need very efficient algorithms to process their data, and massive amount of data to process to provide services from. To take the example of websearches, Google have an important head start, because they have had 10 years to perfect their algos, they had 10 years to collect massive amount of data about all pages available on the web, and more importantly - as was featured several time on /. - their scoring systems works well but work in an iterative fashion. Each time using the already known score of previous page to score the new entries and the refine the old scoring. A google-rating isn't just computed as-is out of the blue, it is computed based on the ratings of other pages related to the given one.
Thus, it will be hard for a new company to arrive on the market and suddenly create a service that can compete with google-search.

The next Evil Empire won't be another software company.
It will be surely a company whose busyness model made the whole "which software are you using" story irrelevant by using standards, and service providing web company are good candidate for it.

The good thing will be, that perhaps the next Evil Empire will be a corporation with "Do No Evil" as it motto, and which hasn't had (yet) a history of illegal and malevolent proceedings for the whole goal of securing its monopoly.

So maybe that will be an evil corporation which will be a little be easier to live under.

Re:A GOOD Windows OS

Why does everyone seem to think Microsoft introduced the various DRM components into Vista because Hollywood pointed a gun at their heads? Isn't it apparent to everyone that Microsoft is also becoming a purveyor of content as well as computer software (and a variety of other products, of course)? I wouldn't at all be surprised to see Microsoft buy a studio in the next decade assuming they could get it past the Antitrust Division.