Windows 7 To Be Released Next Year?

KrispySausage writes "A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would seem to be at least partially verified by news of a milestone build available for review by an anonymous third party." We've previously discussed the upcoming new OS version, as well as its danger to Vista.

If I were Microsoft

given the delays of Vista I would schedule the next version for tomorrow, and hope to deliver some time in 2010.

Low memory requirements from ms...

From TFA:

"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."

I've obviously been in *nix land for too long, I'm still of the impression that 256 Mb is pretty much all one needs for most tasks. Even EMACS!

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

From TFA:

"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."

I've obviously been in *nix land for too long, I'm still of the impression that 256 Mb is pretty much all one needs for most tasks. Even EMACS!


Bloat is relative. Compared to Vista, 480MB is freaking Calista Flockhart-level of skinny.

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

Holy cow. I can remember when my HARD DISK was 480Mb. And that was 10 times bigger than the first hard disk I bought. And even THAT was an upgrade that cost nearly 25% of the computer again.

And, as you point out, that's BEFORE you do anything but actually turn the computer on and wait ten minutes. God knows what happens when you actually WANT to work. XP can boot fairly comfortable for low-to-mid-end users in 256Mb - it ain't fast, it'll swap, but on network managed machines without the usual startup cruft you'll get work done without in-app pauses and for a basic Office suite you won't even notice (I tend to find silent-hard-disk computers are percieved as "faster" by users, even when they are swapping more). 512Mb makes for a nice XP system and anything more is a bonus - I've run networks with hundreds of machines on XP and none of them ever needed more than 512Mb for adequate performance, unless they were doing high-end stuff like CAD - more important is to keep your startup entries clear than put more than 512Mb into an "office" XP machine. But having to have 512Mb before you can even boot the thing up?

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 254296 249912 4384 0 1288 75964
-/+ buffers/cache: 172660 81636
Swap: 473908 41000 432908

170Mb used out of 256. That's with a full KDE GUI (commonly referred to as bloated by a lot of people who obviously don't get out into retail stores and buy Windows much), an Opera process collecting mail from dozens of accounts and browsing hundreds of webpages each day with memory caching, and that's been running for about 26 days now.

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 222712 218960 3752 0 126832 40760
-/+ buffers/cache: 51368 171344
Swap: 1140604 0 1140604

And THAT's a proxy/filter/cache for a school, with transparent bridging that hasn't rebooted in months. 50Mb in use, admittedly no X-Windows running at the moment. Even most of that is Samba, Squid memory cache, Apache and other miscellaneous programs running on it, not all of which are critical to its operation but provide nice web or GUI interfaces to the admins.

Seriously, I know that things move on and you can't stay on a 386 but what benefit does the actual end-user get for all that bloat? What can you do on a 512Mb "Windows 7" machine that you can't on a 512Mb Vista machine, 512Mb XP machine, 512Mb Linux machine? Can you even BOOT with just 512Mb on this new version? More worrying, how many Gigs of rubbish that load on startup does it come with to fill up 480 Mb before you get into the machine? And what does that do to your minimum installation size and baseline CPU use?

I switched, personally, to Linux at home, Linux in work where appropriate (i.e. everything but network-managed desktops, because of the amount of legacy Windows software required) at around the same time that a Linux machine with 256Mb could do the same things as an XP machine with 512Mb, all other things being equal.

I've got a salesman coming tomorrow to try to sell the school Vista, two months after we put in a brand new XP network replacing the previous XP network. They aren't even going to be able to sell us that because I've done my research, which they don't expect smaller schools to do. Too high requirements, too many unnecessary features, too much rubbish, no practical advantage. How are MS going to sell an OS that's going to need literally Gigs of RAM once it's combined with Office and all the usual bundled offering?

This same salesman will be selling Windows 7 in a few years, of course he will, but what do you get for your money? I've seen people selling Windows Vista "digital signage" (i.e. scrol

Development Structure

It will be interesting to see if the new focus on a "clean, lean" Windows 7 can be sustained, given Microsoft's deeply bureaucratic [blogspot.com] development structure.

Each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked.

The quote is from one of the people in the Vista shutdown menu team. It will be hard to winnow the cruft in that sort of environment.

I figured this would happen

Microsoft may have blundered, but they're not dumb. I'm pretty sure they wrote Vista in such a way that it's extensible. So people didn't like Vista, so what? Some people have paid for it, enough at least that they've gotten feedback on how to polish it up. Then they release their next OS, and life goes on. One product failure is not enough to kill MS.

Why is it....

That Microsoft cant do what others can?

I just got a copy of OSX 10.5 for my really old and outdated mac. Specifically to get a working copy of dashcode as I write OSX widgets for Crestron control. I was expecting the worst as installing the latest OS on a old PC never is a good thing.

10.5 makes my machine faster. I kind of looked at it skeptically but it actually boots faster and has a more responsive feel, even NeoOffice opens faster as well as Final Cut.

Why is Apple able to deliver an OS that is faster instead of slower? It's got as much eye candy as vista.

Maybe microsoft needs to have all their programmers re-trained?

FYI: Single processor G4 with only 784 meg of ram, and a crappy laptop video card.

They are just rounding up to "Version 7"

It will really be version 6.66 - use at your own risk.

Re:Marketing Slogan

Windows 7 - because Vista sucked

7 of 2009 says: Hasta la Vista!

The movie version is much better

Windows 7 will remind us all of the movie Seven.

We'll have

glutinous Bloatware
Sloth
greedy pricing
DRM lustfully controlling all media.
Proud non-interoperability
and mac -envy

oh and you get the wrath, like in the movie ending where you find can't take back what is in "the box" because you opened the EULA.

Balmer will play the Kevin Spacey role.

personally I had to leave the theater.

Re:Marketing Slogan

This is EXACTLY how they approach sales. They say the previous version sucked in certain aspects and swear that this version is going to be über.

And we all know how that ends out.

Windows versioning

I'm concerned about the return to numerical versioning.
They went from 3.11, to year-based (98), to cheesy acronyms (ME), to acronyms containing the Mighty Letter "X" (XP), to the vaguely multi-cultural (Vista). Now they're going back to whole numbers. All the joy of 3.11, half the perfomance.
They haven't really cribbed Apple's Roman Numeral approach, so let's work with that.
Vista...VII-STA...VII: Something To Avoid.

Re:Marketing Slogan

That's a terrible count.

Windows 1 - 3 (though the picture here was sort of confused in the first place, but never mind)

Windows 95 (4)
Windows 98 (4.1)
Windows ME (4.2)

The above three being sort of concurrent with:

Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (NT 5)

Then the line was unified as:

Windows XP (5.1)

So Windows Vista is 6 and now we are talking about Windows 7. Got it now?

Re:Marketing Slogan

Congrats on being the first (and so far only) person to get this right; the only thing missing is dates. In my opinion, the dates show parallels between 2K -> XP and Vista -> Windows 7. There was about a year and a half between 2K and XP releases, with XP initially just adding polish and tweaks to smooth out the major architectural changes of 2K. It also gave time for a compatible driver base to get established. In the end this resulted in much better uptake for XP than 2K. Maybe they're shooting for a similar scenario.

Re:Such optimism?

Problems with Vista include:

* UAC - annoying and not remotely secure. People will be trained to always click yes, or just disable it. Further more, it prevented me from installing legit software, and copying files in certain directories.
* Drivers - People say an OS is only as good as the software for it, and I'd argue an OS is only as good as the drivers. If you can't support your hardware, then software isn't even an issue. Now all drivers MUST be signed, yet many signed drivers don't work very well, if at all. I think it would be a good idea to have all drivers in one central repository (like the Linux kernel) so you won't have to worry about tracking down drivers for old hardware, but make sure the drivers work. And here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense.
* Design for productivity, and not looks. Sexy is sexy, and we all like sexy things. In the long run however, I want my computer to enable me to work, not prevent me from doing so. Usability studies have shown that Vista's UI slows people down performing the same tasks. Scrolling in the Start Menu? Again, the writing was on the wall here. Look at the UI changes in Windows Media Player, and you'll see a program that has become less user friendly, while prettier. Why should we expect Vista to be different?
* Performance is piss-poor. Again, people like fast computers. Installing Vista is just a bad decision.
* Vista's worst enemy is not OS X or Linux (as much as I love me some Linux). Vista's worst enemy is XP, which post-SP1 has been a pretty decent OS. For the end user, Vista provides no real benefits or new features besides better looks, while slowing your PC down considerably. And with projects like the Vista Transformation Pack, you can make XP look like Vista. Why would someone want Vista?

Re:Such optimism?

Too many people misread the whole Windows ME thing. Microsoft's goal since the days of Windows NT 3.1 was always to eventually migrate people from the old DOS/Windows codebase to the new NT codebase. In order to do that, they had to get the APIs synched.

Windows NT 3.1 had Win32 and Windows 3.1 had the older 'Win16' API. So they released Win32s for the older DOS/Windows platform, then Windows NT 4.0 with the new user interface. With the Chicago project -- Windows 95 (based on the new UI for NT4) -- was to be the first of the old codebase with the a full version of the new (NT) API, Win32. With that in hand, they had planned to do one more update to each version -- Nashville became Windows 98, and Daytona became Windows 2000. There was supposed to be a combined release of an operating system called 'Cairo' after that, where they finally dropped the whole DOS/Windows thing, but they got sidetracked because they were under pressure to produce a desktop OS for the low-end of the market. So the result was Windows ME, which was rushed out the door at the last minute and annointed as the last of the DOS/Windows line.

Cairo, which was promised to be totally 'object oriented' -- files would be stored as objects in a big database (sound familiar?), but it never happened. So instead, we get, as the first OS of the newly merged OS lines, Windows XP. And yes, XP looks like the greek letter "Chi" and "Ro", of course XP doesn't end up having anything promised in Cairo.

The Cairo promises were to be fullfilled with Vista, but that never happened because the schedule got pushed more and more and they were under pressure to do SOMETHING since competition from Apple and Linux stepped in to fill the void of 5+ years with no new Microsoft OS. So they pushed Vista out the door with none of the promised features and a bunch glitz stolen from Apple. (The last time they stole from Apple, it went exceedingly well, so what the heck, right?)

Windows 7 -- if it's true -- sounds like it could be what Vista was supposed to be. Of course, by now no one will care. It'll be too little, too late, IMHO.

Re:Vista's missing features

I found it hard to continue reading your post after point 1 began with "Microsoft says". As you rightly point out in point 2, MS-says with respect to what we-got in Vista didn't quite match up. MS promised a lot and users got an OS that felt to many like a regression.

MS has a habit of "promising" features that it doesn't know how to deliver; its useful if you want to discourage investment in potential competitors. After all, why go and develop a new fs technology if the company with a 90%+ monopoly in the OS sector is going to integrate it into their product?

"Windows 7" will be an incremental change to Vista with some bug fixes and a desire to gain a better image in the market than the ironically sullied Vista has. How can MS develop features in less than 1 year that they couldn't manage to make in 4?

Re:Vista's missing features

"Microsoft says they learned from their mistakes"

they always do. that's why they repeat them so well.

Re:Vista's missing features

3 - Vista was a total bomb. There is no denying it at all. So why bother? Admit your mistake and move on quickly. All in all, this sounds like a surprisingly smart move on their part.

Has Microsoft ever admitted to making a mistake?

Pretty much [gizmodo.com]

Re:windows7

"Maybe it's like Star Trek movies -- only the even numbered ones are good (in this case, odd numbers)."

so it's not like Star Trek at all then?

Re:windows7

NT4 was alright.

So was Windows 2000.

I'd say Windows releases are more like Batman movies, each ones sucks more than the one before until it gets "re-imagined" into a new series (Win2k), which starts the process over (XP, Vista).

Or maybe like Bond movies, where they're all pretty much the same, only the plots get less believable and you're left longing for the "classic" Bond who didn't need insane gizmos to get the job done. Yes, I like that analogy better.

Re:if only...

Once MS makes an OS that can do all that, I might rejoin the dark side

I'm sure its safe to say MS -wish- they could do it :) They'd just get sued to oblivion by the europeans. MS Office bundled with Windows and forced on the user? Users seeing an MS controled repository of software with everything under the sun? Man, thats their wet dream.

Re:Vista a flop?

No, Vista is awesome.

How can it be awesome when it hasn't even got a Fun Pack ?
Every MS system had its Fun Pack with great games such as Tetris or Pong and fabulous screensavers like, uh, stuff in colours.

Vista needs a Fun Pack to be awesome.

Re:Good news for Linux

I am not one of those people but I know some real Windows experts who can hack around in the registry configuration such that if an update, usually a driver, screws up their machine, then they can probably fix it without going for the complete rebuild option. They also probably keep a "Last Known Good" registry configuration they can switch back to quickly in such a scenario.

As a primarily Linux user, who uses Gentoo for frequent rolling minor updates rather than infrequent major updates, I keep a constant backup of the working kernel and configuration files by use of a cronjob shell script such that if a similar thing happened to me, if I couldn't fix it myself quickly, I would just do a rollback.

What I'm trying to say is that no-one denies that an update to *ANY* operating system can, potentially, screw the system up - but the fact is that preparing for such an eventuality is of primary importance.

I don't use Ubuntu but I would suspect if a Ubuntu update caused lots of people to have baulked machines, then, like Microsoft, Ubuntu would publish a fix on their web site to help get you out of it and it would be up to the user to go find and follow those instructions to get their machines back. But I suspect most Windows users would never bother even checking the MS web site, rather they'd just reinstall their machines or give it to an expert to fix.

In your particular case, it might be a wierd combination of hardware that has caused you, and maybe a handful of other people, to have a problem with an update that most other people didn't suffer. But the chances are that someone else more knowledgeable than you would have seen the problem, fixed it and put it up on the web somewhere - all it would take from you is a little clever Googling to find that out.

Ultimately, this issue has nothing to do with problems caused by whoever created the update, but about you making some effort to analyse what the problem is, look for a fix, and if there isn't one, post some polite messages in appropriate places asking for someone's help - whether it's Windows or Linux, someone will always jump to your assistance if you demonstrate that you can provide as much information as possible as to what the problem is.

Unlike Windows, where you have an expert on "every street corner", Linux requires that you take some responsibility for your own machines and learn as much as you can about how it works - if you're not prepared to do that, then you should find or pay for someone to do that for you or, even better, stay away from Linux.

Unfortunately, there are far too many people out there lost in the "cool factor" of using Linux because it's different to what most other people run who don't think about the ramifications of doing so. Linux is *ONLY* a replacement for Windows if you spend as much time becoming accustomed to it as you did with Windows (albeit you learnt to use computers and Windows pretty transparently) and switching to Linux is not a decision to be taken lightly if you are pretty new to it.

Re:This is fake, mod article down (*sigh*)

Uhh, Windows 7 is just a codename, the version number always refers to the version of the NT kernel. Vista was 6.0, 2003 was 5.2, XP was 5.1, 2000 was 5.0. Apparently Windows "Seven" will be NT 6.2 signifying that it contains minor kernel changes.