Microsoft Windows 7 in 2009

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Microsoft Corp. has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations. It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies. Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched until January 2007. Given Microsoft’s recent track record - Vista arrived more than five years after XP — most outsiders had pegged sometime in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7’s arrival.

Microsoft is targeting the middle of next year for some sort of release milestone for Windows 7 — the only codename known at the moment — though whether that would be a final release to consumers or an RTM, which allows businesses and resellers to start installing it, is unknown. Gates also said that he was “super-enthused about what [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways” but didn’t elaborate. What could those be? Microsoft has divulged a few things. Responding to criticism that Windows has become unnecessarily bloated, the company has 200 engineers developing a slimmed-down kernel called MinWin that uses 100 files and 25MB, compared to Vista’s 5,000 files and 4GB core and is so small it lacks a graphical subsystem. Microsoft has also confirmed that the operating system will come in consumer and business versions and in 32-bit and 64-bit editions.

Source: Computer World