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.

Comments

Re:Nah, not really

[sgbett]

my bet is that they are re-skinning some "New Technology" they are involved with!

2-3 years is normal for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista was released late 2006/early 2007. Windows has had 2-3 year release cycles for most of its life up to Vista (and if you want to count Server 2003, Vista isn't that far off). So end 2009 for the next release is pretty much in line with past releases.

Re:2-3 years is normal for Windows

[UnknowingFool]

Yes but all those releases were incremental upgrades to Windows. They changed parts but the overall design of Windows was the same. Vista took so long because it was a rather large change in the design of Windows. Windows 7 is a complete rethinking. I doubt that could take 2-3 years.

Re:2-3 years is normal for Windows

[Martin Blank]

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.

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

[sw155kn1f3]

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/
This is a short answer from MS employee. Can't be more clear, because entire article was complete bullshit.

Re:I find that hard to believe

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:did I lose count? Windows "7" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 2001 - Windows XP (5.2)

Make that
2001 - Windows XP (5.1)
2003 - Windows XP 64 / Server 2003 (5.2)

or just look at the wikipedia-article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows#Timeline_of_releases

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

[TheLink]

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.

Re:Mods on crack again

[omega_dk]

The not/or sentence construction is grammatically incorrect, unless you mean that OSX is

(not linux-like) or (able to run Windows apps natively) Proper usage would be to say,

Mac OSX is neither Linux-like nor able to run a Windows app natively. Now that that's out of the way:
Mac OSX is, for all intents and purposes, Linux-like. It includes a BSD-derived kernel, and I can use a lot of standard GNU tools, either direct from Apple or through MacPorts, Fink, etc. But for the sake of argument, lets go through the two definitions of Linux-like

So if your definition of Linux-like uses Linux as a kernel, then yes, OSX is Linux-like because it is basically BSD, which most people admit is Linux-like, as they are both Open Source kernels and Unix-like.

If your definition of Linux-like is using the 'GNU over Linux' definition, then the availability of the GNU tools, the X Windowing System being installed either by default or at least on the install disk, and the existence of tools like Fink and MacPorts seems to imply that, in fact, OSX is Linux-like.

As for the ability to run Windows apps natively, the existence of Parallels and VMWare seem to imply otherwise. Neither of them are emulation, just virtualization, so it would seem to me that they offer native execution of Windows Apps.

And I really hope you don't try to deny that OSX is a professional, commercial OS. Because I might have to laugh if you make that claim.

Actually, you're wrong

[melted]

Office 2007 was 6 months late. And that's just for UI overhaul.

Re:Nah, not really

[QRDeNameland]

Totally off-topic, but if you are going to quote Captain Beefheart in your sig, you ought get the quote right:

"A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast 'n bulbous, got me?"

Re:Nah, not really

[AmaranthineNight]

sorry, but OS X isn't UNIX. http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html

Yes it is.

Re:I find that hard to believe

[ianare]

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