So the choices are
Microsoft could do an even worse rushed job with their next OS than usual or they can go back to the endless bait and switch release dates.
Or the customer base can run for the door now.
Gates teases bankers with Windows 7 dates
Bill Gates has dropped the biggest hint yet that Microsoft’s successor to its unloved operating system Windows Vista could arrive around the middle of 2009 – ahead of the firm’s original roadmap. According to reports, the Microsoft head honcho said at a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank on Friday that Windows 7 …
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Monday 7th April 2008 18:13 GMT adnim
I
just can't wait. Nah, sorry won't wait.
Unless leopards have discovered spot remover, with 20 years of developing a GUI method for operating a computer m$ have also revealed their MO.
I would hope that windows 7 will just be an OS, nothing more, no applications, browsers, media players, DRM etc. Eye candy being an optional extra. It would do the job of an OS just the job of an OS. I Accept the line between OS and application can sometimes be blurry. But some tasks are the obvious realms of OS and others App. It would be secure out of the box, It would not require beta testing by the consumer. It would encourage the user to actually learn something about what they do, instead of spoon feeding ignorance and security risk from behind a cartoon. Oh and completely documented, fully user accessible API's would also be of great benefit. However I dream, leopards have always been spotty.
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Monday 7th April 2008 18:13 GMT Craig
Upgrade coupons...
Free upgrade coupon for all scmuc*cough* I mean all customers who bought Windows Vista?
I align myself with the sensible people who figured we'd skip Windows Vista what with it being somewhat new and unpolished, wait for the more refined version of Windows to follow. I sure hope Microsoft don't drop the ball twice in a row.
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Monday 7th April 2008 18:13 GMT Nexox Enigma
But will it have content control?
One of the main reasons Vista blew so hard (and probably took so long to get to market) was their evil content protection measures. Video and audio hardware and associated drivers are now much more costly and slow to develop, which is why Vista has such crappy support for those devices.
I suspect that Windows7 will simply take advantage of the fact that people have been making vista drivers for a while now, so it will have much better support, which means it will perform far better. If the lawyers drive the development still, then I'm pretty sure MS has no chance. Hopefully they learned their lessons on that from vista.
I tried out Win2008 recently, and I have to say that it performs far better than XP as a desktop OS. It's much faster, and, while I'm not a fan of graphical file managers, Explorer has a load of nice features. It really looks like someone actually designed some things this time, instead of just doing whatever worked first.
Unfortunately I had to deal with pops and pauses in my music because nobody makes decent vista sound drivers, and I got about 2/3 the FPS in games that I got in XP, thanks to half-broken video drivers. And of course the CAD software (which is the sole reason for me to keep a Windows machine around any more) wouldn't run on 2k8, so now I'm back on XP.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux (Slackware,) but MS actually did a few things right with 2008 (and probably vista too.) They just let their development get driven by Holywood and lawyers. Maybe they just didn't think they were being evil enough without the content protection stuff.
Ref: http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/vista.pdf
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Monday 7th April 2008 18:36 GMT eddiewrenn
pffft.....
a) it will never happen on time
b) if it does, it will be rushed and not ready
c) And suddenly Microsoft will have three OSs on the go at once (XP, Vista, 7), which I'm sure won't confuse them!
I await with baited breah, and just hope the next version blows us away. Because if it's only Vista + some gloss we should be worried!
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Monday 7th April 2008 18:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Before you start...
Before the Microsoft bashing starts I would like to say that I still have my original Win95 box and maybe I'm just being sentimental but I can't bring myself to get rid of it or upgrade it. Why should I? Less than 200MB and it has given me very little trouble over the years. The sweet old thing just sits there in the closet quietly gathering dust.
Yep, Linux fanboi.
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Monday 7th April 2008 18:36 GMT Ross Fleming
What's it got to do with Bill?...
Wasn't Gates promising to leave? Rather baffled that so far he seems to still be around!
Anyway, I'd be ignoring the large hardware requirements being slung about - I've got a strong suspicion that Windows 7 is going to be largely a Hypervisor.
Besides - can't we keep calling it Blackcomb? I'm sure Vista was the stop-gap between Whistler (XP) and Blackcomb - unfortunately it's painfully obvious that it's a stop-gap at the moment.
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Monday 7th April 2008 20:15 GMT Plankmeister
They should...
...just open-source Windows for the desktop. Then they can still sell Windows Server products and all the office apps and other assorted piles 'o' poo they peddle...
By open-sourcing Windows, they'd - within a couple of years - have a *very* strong product free of all bloat, that pretty much everyone would use.
Surely M$ make enough money already... Think of all the money they'd save if they didn't have to employ all those useless Windoze coders who use dubious programming techniques (Such as this one plucked from the leaked Win2k source:
private\ntos\w32\ntuser\client\nt6\user.h:
* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt.)
Open-sourcers do it for FREE!
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Monday 7th April 2008 22:46 GMT Kurt Guntheroth
Vista SP2
Does anybody remember when Longhorm was going to be released in 2005, and it was going to have that whizzy filesystem-is-a-database, and all that other nifty stuff? Well, welcome to Vista SP2. You'll be expected to pay for it, which is great news (for Microsoft) for a service pack. But it will have good compatibility with the previous O/S version. In 2013 when this code finally escapes from Redmond, it might actually be the O/S that Microsoft bragged it would be. Yeah, 8 years late, but maybe worth the wait. Well, I'm waiting, anyway.
The penguin, because if you need a new O/S before 2013, he's always there.
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Monday 7th April 2008 22:46 GMT Julian
Windows NT6.1 (Windows 7)
I have seen screen shots of Windows 7 build 6519 on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows. Its labelled Windows 6.1. Since Vista is 6.0 it safe to assume that it will be a revised build of Vista. Possibly more stable (it would be hard to be worse) with some of the features they jettisoned on Vista to get it out in err time! procrastination aside I expect Microsoft will release Windows 7 more or less on time as they have less work to do.
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Monday 7th April 2008 22:46 GMT N
And also have to buy
At least 8 SLi graphics cards with water cooling
A one megawatt power supply (but hey its OK cos its 85% efficient when run flat out)
A terrbyte of ram
A petabyte of disk space
three weeks to install & right at the last little bit it goes...
Windows has encountered errors and needs to shut down or some inane message like:
You need to install 256 million updates as your PC is 5 minutes out of date...
The license you just forked out for & activated is not recognised, Enjoy the new Microsoft experience by paying twice. Windows is now running in reduced functionality mode and switches off...
Why tolerate this hapless junk?
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Monday 7th April 2008 22:46 GMT Jeff Davies
Andy - there was a Windows 1 - it was called "Windows 286 and Windows 386"
There were 2 versions of Windows 1: Windows/286 and Windows/386.
Windows/286 ran on a 286 with 1meg of RAM.
It had notepad and calc and paint as I recall, and Program manager, task manager,
and a DOS windows. I don't know if anything else was written at the time to run under it.
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Tuesday 8th April 2008 00:43 GMT Charles Manning
Vista rushed out the door?
Really? 5 years or so is a rush?
Anything that takes 5 years to develop and still does not work properly is fundamentally broken. They had to ship Vista just to get it out the way so that they could focus on doing the next one right. The alternative was to just delete everything and start again from scratch - which would have annoyed shareholders no end.
The biggest problem MS really faces is that XP is probably "good enough" for most people and MS just does not understand how to add eye candy in a meaningful way. It is really hard to follow up on a success when you have no real clue how you can do better.
Touting a non-existant OS version really does make Vista look bad: "We dropped the ball, but might be able to find it again in a year or so." In the past MS have only done this when they've got something new to sell. eg. When they released XP they went on about how terrible W98 was. They tried this with Vista too, but the backlash was bad.
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Tuesday 8th April 2008 03:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
The good news
Bill's comment makes a wonderful counter to all those Vista-boosting "computer enthusiast" users....
instead of "no you can't have Vista on your office machine" we can now say:
"Bill Gates says that Windows 7 is just around the corner so there's no point in installing Vista when something better is on the way"
That kind of user has never clued in to the fact that vendors are, aah, *creative* when it comes to announcements about future products.
BTW, the "7" is because it's the 7th revision of Windows *NT* (did NT v1 & 2 ever exist, or were they just totally unsaleable?). The original Windows line ended with Me.
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Tuesday 8th April 2008 05:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
cavemen and windows
@Damien Jorgenson
F**K OSX and that Linux FAD
MS RULES
Congratulations, you just won the cyber-neanderthal award. There's nothing like a well considered opinion and what you said was nothing like a well considered opinion.
Moving on...
Here's what I remember - MS had to drop loads of the "features" of Vista because it was "too hard to make them work right". Some/all of the MS people emailed BG and said "we need to start again and build the new Windows from the ground up". This also turned out to be too hard.
Pressure from the Market Regulators resulted in MS releasing Vista when it was little more than a grotesque graphic layer added to the Server2003 code base with the ever present security nag screens added to offset the terminal stupidity of most Windows users. "I can't believe the OS is asking me if I'm sure I trust and want to run the software I just installed, how retarded is that?"
Windows will never be what it claims to be, and what OSX and especially Linux already is, secure by design. Because Microsoft are too proud and too stiff necked to admit the Unix model is best and copy it. So they'll release version after version of hopelessly insecure OS's and the security industry will continue to make bazillions off the back of it.
Prediction: At some point MS will turn up and say "the new windows is on our servers, you need only have a network connection (and a weekly fully paid up subscription) to access it".
The resultant laughter will be heard all over the earth.
Some hapless fools will actually use this new Software as a Service version of Windows which will turn out to be so badly designed that the MS servers will begin to crash, blue screen and lose data.
This will be blamed on Linux and terrorists.
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Tuesday 8th April 2008 08:19 GMT Lars
New name, same codebase.
Microsoft wants to get rid of the Vista name: Windows was better, right.
But Windows 7 will only be Vista with some rubbish deleted and probably some new rubbish added. Some new icons but basically Vista SP3-4.
The nice thing about it is that they can again sell it as a new OS.
Now perhaps even deliver it in time (or something).
Next, Gartner and others, will tell you that moving to Windows 7 will be so much easier (and so wonderful) if you do it from Vista and not XP.
And while you are waiting (again) , Linux on the desktop, is surpassing Windows in every possible way.
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Tuesday 8th April 2008 08:49 GMT Mark Rendle
I want my beta!
My, but there are a lot of negative Nancies on the Reg today. Personally, I quite like Vista, although I was disappointed that some of the promised features got dropped. Of course, a lot of the Vista features were also made available for XP SP2 and Server 2003 R2 (WPF, WCF, WF), which may have negated the need to upgrade, but they were still part of the Vista development.
Anyway, I'm going to maintain a childlike enthusiasm for 7 until something concrete happens to disappoint me. Weird, I know, but I reckon I'll be happier on average that way.
Things that enthuse me so far: MinWin, a Windows kernel with a basic webserver running in 40 megs; rumours that WinFS will be in this time (cautious optimism there); Hypervisor on the desktop. I've already got my beta hardware picked out...
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Tuesday 8th April 2008 08:51 GMT Sergiu Panaite
Are you serious...?
All the *nix fanbois out there, do you really mean it? If so, wow..
I have to say, I don't LIKE Windows as such, in fact it's a pretty poor excuse for a cutting-edge OS (and I'm talking about XP - my current install has lasted me about four years, through two complete hardware changes). Sure, it's starting to get slow and has inexplicable bugs, but at least I can fix most of them. On top of that, I can play games. And if I would be an ordinary user, I would surely appreciate how relatively easy it is to use/install/etc. Of course a lot of this is so because M$ have people firmly by the b@lls, there's no denying that.
I tried Ubuntu 7.10 recently, and it just didn't satisfy me. Sure, it was free, it did things well, the package manager actually works, and there's plenty of free software for it - but I still can't play my games on it, and it won't recognise some of my more "special" hardware unless I'm willing to really get my hands dirty (which I am, but I'm not a "normal" user).
So honestly, please stop trying to shove *nix (or even MacOS) down people's throats when they're still not suitable for a large chunk of the audience. I'm sure they'll get there, it'll just take a wee bit longer - say, maybe until mid-2009?
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
