..Isn't that illegal?

Why start worrying about another OS now? Vista may not be the shit but is rather nice once you get used to it. Personally I will be switching to Win7 damn near as soon as its available. So why start worrying about another version when the next isnt even released let alone find and fix whatever bugs may be in that because you know damn well that Win8 will be based off Win7. Oh screw it let the flame wars commence.

Are we talking about the same company here? This is the company who insisted we create a live account in order for our company to track our corporate licence counts for office, exchange, sql, etc, and who promptly de-activated the account and erased all the online records for our licence tracking 90 days later.

When we came to add more licences the next year Microsoft just didn't want to know. They didn't see why we had a problem with their corporate licencing service wiping out all online records if you don't log in every 90 days. They couldn't even understand our frustration at the fact that we could re-activate the account, but that they had no way of re-attaching the licence records to it, they just assumed we would happily re-register all the certificates from the originals in the safe...

Clueless, absolutely clueless.

"The OS isn't done till WinFS gets canned" seems to be the Redmond mantra.

WinFS has been promised as a core feature for every release since the early 1990s. Nearly twenty years on and it still gets deferred.

"Microsoft was one of the first to offer free web mail with Hotmail, which it acquired...."

That's an interesting sentence. It almost makes it sound like Microsoft was one of the first to offer free web mail service, when it was actually Hotmail which did so.

By this logic, if I ate the cow, and the cow ate the grass, does that mean that I performed photosynthesis?

Why don't you all get a real operating system like Linux.

I've got and iPhone and all Apple fanbois suck

Windoze is the most security hole ridden piece of SHITE the world ha ever seen.

Actually I quite like Vista and have been running it on my custom built PC with twin over-head mother fuckers and braided power supply leads now for 2.36759 years and am yet to encounter any issues whatsoever.

Paris because I'd like to Windows 8 her.

Mines the one with the "I love O/S2" on the back.

All versions of windows shared all their files with anybody already

WinFS is currently delayed by the requirement that it support Duke Nukem Forever. Once that requirement is met, WinFS will be out RSN.

Paris does...

XP does everything I need it to.

Thanks but no thanks.

Woo, with this kind of news it's hard not to love Microsoft and Windows and their perpetual optimism.

Why, just as they leave a trail of rubbish Operating System failures behind them, they are always looking forward to what the next OS will be. It's like they are so brainwashed that they don't realise how awful their products are.

I, for one, welcome our new Windows 8 overlords and their glorious WinFS of doom

Praise be to Ballchin and his goons. Why make quality when you can make quantity!

Thad is right, the reason for this is just to keep the Microsoft Money Machine working. If they were really interested in producing a decent operating system they'd concentrate on making one excellent system rather than trying to resell the same old rubbish with a few minor improvements.

Interesting how this news comes out on the day the next version of Ubuntu is released...

I installed Windows Vista on day one release. I actually built a system just for Windows Vista so i had no problems at all with it. I think its the best OS so far. I will upgrade to Windows 7 as soon as it comes out as well and verson 8 whenever its released sometime in the future. Though upgrades may not offer tons of new features they always offer many new featrues and when it somes to new features i like them ;)>

in the sense that new OSs will come more regularly but with less changes.

Just one thing with that good idea (not their idea though, obviously), they need to update their pricing model to reflect that!

They start work on Windows 9, because thats what you really should have bought!

Yawn

Sounds an awful lot like what *nix has been doing for years. The more I read about what shit MS is getting up to, the more and more I look at doing a dull swap. All I need is

1) Something "Media Center" like (Myth?)

2) A compatible printer (quite fancy a new Kodak job)

3) VPN support (CheckPoint, pull your bloody finger out!)

Got Jaunty RC installed last night in a VirtualBox image, looks pretty sweet.

Think of skimming a stone - the product bounces less high but more often towards the end of its useful life.

I just love the reaction of all those obedient Wintards.

Ballmer says "Jump", the Wintards eagerly reply "How high, master?"

Somehow though I feel they have lost a few of the faithful along the way with the Vista debacle. People disappointed with Vista have sought other pastures and they may well not be back.

I wish you well MS no hard feelings, but the world changed and you didn't! See ya around...

@Antony - ROTFL. Good work.

As regards Windows 8: Call me paranoid, but given that Windows 7 has been rushed out in response to the Vista debacle, is it reasonable to suppose that Windows is, in *fact* just what Windows 7 was *going* to be before they had to rush out another interim release?

Perhaps I could have explained that better. think of it this way:

MS product name | Real world.

Windows Vista = Broken

Windows 7 = Windows Vista v1.1

Windows 8 = Windows 7 (rebadged)

Mine's the one with the Apple on the back.

Win 95, Win 98 ]- a lot of similarities, esp. in terms of UI. 98 fixed a lot of 95's problems, but 95 was the back-end revolution.

Win 2K, Win XP ]- again, loads of similarities, with providing the back-end upgrade and XP polishing the UI and fixing the usability problems.

Vista, Win 7]- Extremely similar. Vista pushed the technology forward, with Win 7 providing the more user-friendly product.

I guess this means that Win 8 will have 'issues'. Also, none of the above feature WinFS, and neither will Win 8 (unless the come-up with a fundamentally different FS and brand it WinFS do they don't look like 'tards).

>to the anti ms people here

>you know that even with your os of choice that you upgrade versions right,

Yep, but we don't get shafted for license fees and new hardware every damn time.

> Oh and to the linux people who say that each version should take less resources or the same , there have been many arcticles out there detailing the software/hardware leapfrogging,

So? That's not a good reason for rolling over and accepting it. I don't see why some idiot at MS should make me spend another £500 to increase my hardware just because my XP machine that works fine can't cope with Vista/7/8. They can go F*** themselves.

My personal feelings aside, there's huge downward pressure on power consumption, driven by increasing mobile use, and demand for energy in general. Failing some major revolution in power generation, population control or battery technology, we need tech that does the same for less energy. MS is consistently failing to deliver on this front.

> i hope to go the general populus doesn't trust most of the commenters here with anything actually important to do with it . i would fear for the world if they do

I fear for the world if we listen to MS and their apologists too much.

I actually think this is a good thing for MS - a faster release schedule on major versions has to be a benefit because it means they can react to criticism (and let's face it, Vista IS a bust for them) more quickly. Sadly for them, I think they'll listen to the wrong critics.

For those of you who exclaim yawns of boredom at this news, let me give a brief explanation.

WinFS is an entirely new, ground-up approach to filesystems. BeOS is the only other OS that has ever attempted such a change (as far as I'm aware) but never made any impact due to not actually being finished. I suspect Google have implemented something similar, but it's not available outside of mountain view.

Instead of a flat filesystem, WinFS uses a relational database system that allows for extensible metadata. This is a truly massive change on many levels.

The extensible metadata allows the OS and applications running on it to glean truly intelligent information about the files stored. A movie file will no longer just contain file length, codec, dimensions etc. Year, director cast list can be added.

Being a relational database, querying for searches becomes blindingly fast, hence my Google suspicions. This will have a truly massive impact on the fileserver market, which is clearly why the project is so closely tied to server 2008(9?)

As for exposing the APIs, I heartily agree that if it is to become a success, then MS need to be open enough for developers to take advantage of these new features, but the filesystem is based on SQL, and the extensible metadata is built on XML tech, so there's not exactly going to be a steep learning curve.

as for the peer-to-peer tech, do you realise that MS have already released some pretty groung breaking stuff in XP SP3? Have a look under your add/remove components -> networking services for Peer-to-Peer. It's an API open to developers for use in their applications

Distributed, SERVERLESS peer name resolution!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb726971.aspx

haven't kazaa, limewire et al been working toward this holy grail for some time now?

You mention R2 as if it is already shipping. It's based on the Windows 7 kernel which is currently in beta and won't be available until late this year or early next. The current shipping version of 2008 is based on Vista.

EA sports!

What next?

Windows 2011/12/13 and so on!

Windows World Cup Edition (when its world cup year)

Windows Christmas Special

"The extensible metadata allows the OS and applications running on it to glean truly intelligent information about the files stored. A movie file will no longer just contain file length, codec, dimensions etc. Year, director cast list can be added."

Honestly, who cares about extensible metadata? How does that allow me to do my job more efficiently? Some of us don't really care to input a TON of metadata for every file we generate. I am sure that extensible metadata would allow the DRM that Microsoft decides to embed in every OS to report when you have a file that is not Kosher. Then I guess that they can use some kind of fancy trick to remove it from your computer for you. No thanks MS. I had hopes for Vista, but then you decided that you knew better than I did about what I want (and do not want) on my computer.

Easy to understand, the sooner they get to 10 the better

MacOS X or 10

Solaris 10 or X

Win X(P) or 10p

Vista blurrish, Win7 dwarves ... well

/mine's the snowwhite leopard pelt

All I hear is Cloud computing, offsite storage and the like...

Office 2009, I mean, do you really trust others with your Data ? Are you allowed to ?

I'm not, neither is the rest of my department....

Their vision for the future is flawed but people in the trades are still buying it....whores...

We don't need MORE features, we Need more BUG FIXES....

I know i know, no one will build the one year battery, there's no money in that...

But constantly upgrading to less secure, less personal and more expensive crap

has got to stop sometime....probably when hackers or M$ brings us to our knees when one of them Declares "All you Datas are belong to Us"...be too late then...suckers.

"We will also soon be starting major improvements for Windows 8 where we will be including innovative features which will revolutionize file access in branch offices"

Windows 8 = Windows for Workgroups 3.12 then...