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

I find that hard to believe

[AC-x]

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

Re:I find that hard to believe

[bcmm]

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

[BountyX]

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 don't think so

[PopeRatzo]

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.

+1 Insightful

[Joce640k]

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".

Longhorn next year!

[Groggnrath]

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.

Paradigm shifts and evil empires

[DrYak]

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 i