Microsoft hasn’t said what features will be in Windows 7, but analysts have some ideas of their own.

By now, everyone has heard how Microsoft Corp. plans to release the next Windows client OS, Windows 7, in 2010. But what the company is not making clear is what new features the OS will have, a topic that has become fodder for educated speculation.

Analysts said Microsoft probably is keeping tight-lipped about what Windows 7 will look like because at this point, company engineers and executives don’t even know.

“They don’t want to commit because they don’t have a good idea what’s in it,” said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Inc. “We’re three years out, so you can’t really expect that much detail.”

Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said with so many people still in the midst of upgrading to the latest client OS, Windows Vista, he’s hesitant to speculate on what might be in the next OS. “We barely know the features of the one we just got,” he said with a laugh.

That said, Cherry is expecting less “earth-shattering” new features than improvements on some of the new ones found in Windows Vista, such as the Bitlocker encryption feature, which is currently hard for the average PC user to navigate.

“You have to partition your hard drive and do a bunch of things, and you can only really today protect one drive, whereas many machines have more than one,” he said.

Cherry also pointed to a common hardware performance problem many users face because of Vista’s “very large footprint.” “It’s one of the things they might want to address — hardware utilization and performance,” he said. “It’s hard to put a big wrapper around that; it just needs to be better.”

One Microsoft executive gave a slight hint about what might turn up in Windows 7 earlier this year at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division, said in an interview that a “fundamental piece of enabling technology,” such as a hypervisor or a drastic change in the user interface, would likely turn up in Windows 7.

Fathi also said at RSA in February that Microsoft was in the middle of the planning process for Windows 7’s features and would know more over the next few months, which suggests the company now has a good idea what the OS will look like but is declining to disclose that information.

While both a hypervisor and a new user interface are possibilities for Windows 7, the former is almost a given, Gartner’s Silver said. “It almost has to go” in the OS, he said, describing the technology as “a really thin OS” that manages virtual machines running on the system.

It would behoove Microsoft to put a hypervisor in Windows 7 because it would give them more control over the hardware the OS runs on, something the company would prefer to have, Silver said.

“The hypervisor really owns the hardware, and Microsoft likes owning the hardware and they want to be one of the people to standardize [hypervisor technology],” he said.

Vista includes new features such as desktop search and a new user interface, which also are two areas that leave room for expansion in Windows 7, analysts said.

Microsoft has shown the direction it’s going with the latter with its Surface computer, introduced in late May. That form factor looks like a coffee table with a touchscreen interface that lets users move photos around by hand synchronize devices by placing them on the table.

With products such as the Apple iPhone making the touchscreen popular with consumers, a touchscreen UI in Windows 7 is a possibility, Silver said. “They don’t want to look bad next to Apple,” he said.

Desktop search, a new feature built into Vista, also has room for improvement. Microsoft has said it will link desktop search to Windows Server 2008 so desktop users can search not only for local files, but also for files on the server. This is a feature that potentially could be built into the desktop OS.

The prolonged, three-month launch of Windows Vista is finally history. Microsoft delivered Vista to business users on Nov. 30 and to the rest of the world on Jan. 29. So now it’s on to the “Fiji” and “Vienna” releases about which we’ve been hearing for months, right?Wrong.

Future versions of Windows are going to bear little resemblance to what we’ve heard so far officially — and unofficially — from Microsoft and the individuals who love to leak tidbits about the company. In fact, according to one of my reliable tipsters, the new and reorganized Windows organization, led by Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky, is trying to wean folks completely off the Windows code names they have been using for the next couple of releases of Windows.

Welcome to the brave new world of “Windows 7″ (a boringly named complement to “Office 14,” the successor to Office 2007).

(This column, by the way, is purely speculative, a cobbling together of source information and my own hunches. Microsoft won’t talk about Windows futures right now, in part because the company doesn’t want to take the focus off Vista, and also because the Windows organization is still trying to sort itself out. Company officials aren’t even venturing to talk about when Vista Service Pack 1 will hit.)

Whatever Windows 7 ends up looking like, there’s one thing I’m counting on — it’s not going to be developed, tested or marketed anything like its recent Windows predecessors. It’s likely to be less ambitious in its goals, feature set and its development, be more modular in its design and, possibly, more role-based in its delivery. In general, watch for more incremental Windows releases, supplemented by more feature pack/service pack updates. This will be coupled with more new components released as services.

Given that Sinofsky, head of Windows and Windows Live engineering, most recently lorded over the development of Microsoft Office, it seems natural to look for clues about Windows in not only the Windows history archives, but maybe especially in the Office annals.

Here’s what we know about Vista: It’s too big, still hampered by internal code dependencies and was concocted by way too many cooks. Because of this, the product kept slipping and shedding features, missed the holiday buying season and was released to market before many Microsoft partners (and Microsoft product teams) had delivered Vista-compatible drivers and applications.

Here’s what we know about Office: New versions ship every two years, like clockwork. If the development process is messy and features/functionality are cut, no one seems to know or care. Even when it includes controversial new features — like Office 2007’s ribbon user interface and the new XML file format that require a downloadable patch in order for users of older versions to read Office 2007 Open-XML-formatted documents. Nevertheless, Office still comes out smelling like a rose.

What can Microsoft do to make Windows more like Office?

• Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Don’t over-promise.
• Trim (or, more accurately, ax) the size of the team developing the product.
• Stop talking about unreleased products. Don’t share publicly a list of promised features/functionality before the product is totally locked down. Punish transgressors both inside and outside the company.
• Cease sharing any information about delivery milestones or dates. Never talking about ship targets means never having to say you’re sorry.
• Ban historical references. Anyone mentioning “WinFS,” “Cairo” or “Hailstorm” gets put in the penalty box.

Microsoft is currently facing some of the same problems with Vista it has been experiencing with Office for a couple of years now. The biggest competitor to Vista isn’t Mac OS X or Linux — it’s Windows XP. Consequently, the Windows team increasingly finds itself in the same straits as the Office folks — namely, it needs to convince users who don’t really need a brand new release of Windows that they do. Let’s see what Sinofsky & Co. come up with, beyond making new, desirable features available only to customers who sign multi-year volume- licensing contracts.

Microsoft is planning to ship its next major version of Windows–known internally as version “7″–within roughly three years, CNET News.com has learned.

The company discussed Windows 7 on Thursday at a conference for its field sales force in Orlando, Fla., according to sources close to the company.

While the company provided few details, Windows 7, the next client version of the operating system, will be among the steps taken by Microsoft to establish a more predictable release schedule, according to sources. The company plans a more “iterative” process of information disclosure to business customers and partners, sources said.

Windows Vista, the oft-delayed most recent release of Windows, shipped to businesses in November and to consumers in January after more than five years of development. Vista’s gestation period was marked by shifting product details as internal priorities changed and problems arose with development.

Like Vista, Windows 7 will ship in consumer and business versions, and in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The company also confirmed that it is considering a subscription model to complement Windows, but did not provide specifics or a time frame.

Next up on Microsoft’s agenda is Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, which is expected before year’s end.

The discussion of Windows’ future isn’t surprising, given that Microsoft has been criticized by business customers for delays related to Vista. Many business customers pay for Microsoft’s software under a license agreement called Software Assurance.

Windows 7 was previously known by the code name Vienna. A Microsoft representative confirmed that Windows 7 is the internal code name for the next client release of Windows. The details were released “as part of our ongoing outreach to enterprise customers and partners, Microsoft has begun sharing plans for how they will continue to deliver value to businesses in the future…Software Assurance customers in particular,” a representative said in a statement via e-mail.

“Microsoft is scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year time frame, and then the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar,” according to the representative.

The post-Vista edition of Windows doesn’t yet have a name, but it’s got a date - 2010 - and it’s getting a fresh look.

The former was revealed at Microsoft’s Global Exchange sales conference in Orlando last week, according to Windows watcher Mary Jo Foley. Foley cites a PowerPoint presentation indicating that “Microsoft is anticipating it will take at least three years from now to get the next version of Windows client out the door.” A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Foley that ” Microsoft is scoping Windows ‘7′ development to a three-year timeframe, and then the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar.”

If you’re wondering what happened to the codenames of Vienna, and before that Blackcomb, which were originally attached to the OS, Windows senior VP Steven Sinofsky has banished those ciphers name as a sign of his desire to refocus the team on the steak rather than the sizzle. It’s in keeping with Sinofsky’s previous reign over Office 2000, XP/2002, 2003 and 2007 - all of which were known only by their internal version numbers (such as Office 2007 being ‘Office 12′) before being christened with a marketing label.

The next edition of Windows will technically be the seventh generation of the Windows NT codebase which is now the foundation for the client OS (the clock starts at Windows NT 3.1; this was followed by NT 4, while Windows 2000 was also ‘Windows NT 5′ and XP a mere 5.1, until Vista clicked the meter over to Windows version 6).

And as he did with Office 2007, Sinofsky has declared that all bets are off when it comes to the UI of Windows 7. He’s hired Julie Larson-Green, who lead the Office 2007 user interface team under Sinofsky’s watch, as VP in charge of the “the Windows User Experience” or UX program.

Larson-Green was pivotal in the dramatic redesign of Office 2007, which ditched the long-established model of menus and toolbars - which had grown cluttered and out of control over two decades of development - for that single integrated and context-morphing ‘ribbon’. Few could argue that Windows isn’t in need of a similar cleanup job - the iconic overload of Vista’s Control Panel is a prime example of a once-friendly UI turned ferral.

Jensen Harris, who was program manager for the Office 2007 UX team and now fills Larsen-Green’s role in fine-tuning the face of Office 14 (not wishing to tempt fate, they’re skipping 13!) recalls that it was Sinofsky who drove the suite’s radical interfacelift.

“It originated with Steven Sinofsky” Harris told APC in a recent interview. “Steven had certainly noticed, like we all had, the growing interface clutter around the core Office apps, and he thought we should put a set of people together and at least think about this. But I sometimes think that he didn’t really expect us to actually replace the entire UI!

“Maybe Steven asked for a lot so we would deliver more than just a little, because it would take a lot to budge people from the way things had been for 20 years. Perhaps his thinking was to ask for a mile in order to get just 200 feet. But we ended giving him the whole mile, and then some”.

Harris recalls that Larsen-Green was a staunch advocate for rethinking the way Office worked and, more importantly, that way users wanted it to work. “She recruited me to do something bold to change the UI of Office. I was very sceptical at first - my feeling was that we would never be bold enough to actually make a real change, that really what we were talking about was doing some other incremental bandaid on top of the way things used to work. (But) Julie really sold me on the idea that she was really serious about trying to understand the problems with the UI, and if we can understand it and can come up with the idea, that we can go and do it.”

Of her new role in the Windows team, Harris observes “Julie is definitely a champion of building great user experiences, and I know that in Windows she’ll be looking to do the same types of things that she did in Office, which espouse great design values. Whether or not that means we’ll see such a radical overhaul of the UI in Windows 7, I think it’s too early to say”.

Two things are certain: Sinofsky is a serious agent of change for the Windows OS, and Larsen-Green hasn’t been brought into the Windows 7 UX team to keep things the way they are.

Source : http://apcmag.com/6741/new_ui_for_windows_7

Windows “Vienna” (formerly known as Blackcomb) is a codename for a future version of Microsoft Windows, originally announced in February 2000, but has since been subject to major delays and rescheduling. Microsoft now announced it will be released in 2009, and according to a magazine called “Smart Computing In Plain English”, work on it began right after Windows Vista came out. As of February 2007, the name of the operating system used internally is undisclosed and is not used publicly by Microsoft, though “Windows 7″ has been noted in job postings as a working name for the project.

Microsoft has refrained from discussing the details about “Vienna” publicly as they focus on the release and marketing of Windows Vista, though some early details of various core operating system features have emerged at developer conferences such as Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in 2006.

Development

The code name “Blackcomb” was originally assigned to Windows NT 6, an operating system that was planned to follow Windows XP (codenamed “Whistler;” both named after the Whistler-Blackcomb resort). Blackcomb would be the successor to both the desktop/workstation-oriented Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1) and the server-oriented Windows Server 2003 (Windows NT 5.2). In late 2001 the release of Blackcomb was being scheduled for 2005 and in August it was announced that a minor intermediate release, Vista (codenamed “Longhorn” after a bar in the Whistler Blackcomb Resort), would ship in 2002 to update the Windows NT 5.x line. Over the following years Longhorn morphed in fits, starts, and delays to incorporate many of the features promised for Blackcomb and was eventually designated as Windows NT 6. The status of the operating system dubbed “Blackcomb,” however, was shrouded in confusion with some reports suggesting that plans for Blackcomb were scrapped while others claiming that it would be the monicker for a server-only Windows 6.x release. More likely, the codename “Blackcomb” was discarded as no longer being in the spirit of its original intent (i.e., to describe Windows NT 6). At the present, it is believed that Windows Vista’s successor (referred to here as Windows “Vienna”) is being planned as both a client and server release with a current release estimate of late 2009, although no firm date or year has yet been publicized. A recent article provided from Yahoo!News projected the release date to be closer to 2009.

Focus

At first, internal sources pitched Blackcomb as being not just a major revision of Windows, but a complete departure from the way users today typically think about interacting with a computer. For instance, the “Start” philosophy, introduced in Windows 95, may be replaced by the “new interface” which was said in 1999 to be scheduled for “Vienna” (before being moved to Vista (”Longhorn”) and then back again to “Vienna”). While Windows Vista was intended to be an evolutionary release, Vienna was targeted directly at revolutionizing the way users of the product interact with their PCs. However, the situation has now changed. Windows Vista, which was expected to be a minor release became a major release, when it was released five years after the release of Windows XP. Windows “Vienna” will become a minor release, and is currently planned to be released two years after Windows Vista.

On February 9, 2007, Microsoft’s Ben Fathi claimed that the focus on the operating system was still being worked out, and could merely hint at some possibilities:

“We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it’s hypervisors, I don’t know what it is” […] “Maybe it’s a new user interface paradigm for consumers.”

—Ben Fathi, Windows Core Operating System Division Vice President

Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek, also suggested that the next version of Windows would “be more user-centric.” When asked to clarify what he meant, Gates said:

“That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you’ve got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you’re interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else’s PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that’s kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won’t need textbooks, they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We’ll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we’ve got a pretty good outline.”

Other features

Several other features originally planned for Windows Vista may be part of “Vienna”, depending on when they are finished.

“Vienna” will also feature the sandboxed approach discussed during the Alpha/White Box development phase for Longhorn. All non-managed code will run in a sandboxed environment where access to the “outside world” is restricted by the operating system. Access to raw sockets will be disabled from within the sandbox, as will direct access to the file system, hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and complete memory addressing. All access to outside applications, files, and protocols will be regulated by the operating system, and any malicious activity will be (theoretically) halted immediately. If this approach is successful, it bodes very well for security and safety, as it is virtually impossible for a malicious application to cause any damage to the system if it is locked inside a metaphorical ‘glass box.’ As well, this sand boxed environment will be able to adapt itself to the code base it was written for. This will alleviate most problems that arise from back compatibility when a new operating system is made.

Another feature mentioned by Bill Gates is “a pervasive typing line that will recognize the sentence that [the user is] typing in.” The implications of this could be as simple as a “complete as you type” function as found in most modern search engines, (e.g. Google Suggest) or as complex as being able to give verbal commands to the PC without any concern for syntax. The former has been incorporated to an extent in Windows Vista.

Backward compatibility

Microsoft has stated that “Vienna” will be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit for the client version, in order to ease the industry’s transition from 32-bit to 64-bit computing. Vienna Server is expected to support only 64-bit server systems. There will be continued backward compatibility with 32-bit applications, but 16-bit Windows and MS-DOS applications will not be supported, as has been the case since the 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. However, Paul Thurrott claims in his Supersite for Windows, that according to Microsoft’s x64 migration schedule, Windows Vienna will almost certainly only ship in 64-bit editions.

Microsoft has reiterated its commitment to the desktop. Building on its co-founder Bill Gates’ vision of a PC on every desk in every home, Microsoft will continue to focus on delivering desktop products. And in this context, nothing will change when it comes down to the development of the company’s main cash cows.

Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System will be followed by Windows Seven and Office 14. Kevin Turner, Chief Operating Officer, present at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2007 in Denver on July 10 emphasized the fact that Windows
Vista will neither be the last of its kind, nor the last big operating system release from the Redmond company. The same strategy is valid for the Office 2007 System.

“You know, we started out as a client desktop company 32 years ago, and built a very successful and promising business. Certainly this last year has been an unprecedented year for Vista and Office and the launch. And we are still committed to the desktop. There will be another release and launch of a Vista type operating system. There will be another release of Office, and we’re going to continue to invest in that, because the customer wants a choice,” Turner stated.

For the second time in five weeks, information about a key upcoming Microsoft product has come to light because of a presentation placed on the company’s Web site by an employee in Denmark.

According to a PowerPoint presentation download PDF created by a technical staffer at Microsoft Denmark, the software vendor plans to invest in four major areas in the next client version of Windows after Vista. Microsoft has already begun working on its next OS, and one executive indicated last month that the company hopes to ship the follow-on during 2009 — although Microsoft later issued a statement saying that it is “not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows.”

The PowerPoint presentation, which is dated January 31 and can be accessed via Microsoft’s download.microsoft.com site, was publicised on Aeroxperience, an independent blog aimed at Windows Vista developers.

The Aeroxperience posting says that two slides in the presentation contain information that “more than likely applies to ‘Windows Seven,’” the codename that Microsoft is said to be using internally for the successor to Vista.

According to the slides, planned areas of investment for end users in Windows Seven include making it easier to find information and improving mobile connectivity. For example, a detailed list of future Windows features includes converged local, network and internet search capabilities and improved wireless connectivity, management and security.

For IT professionals, the presentation indicates, planned improvements include added security measures, such as extending data protection and management capabilities to peripheral devices and expanding usage monitoring capabilities for compliance purposes. Cutting PC operating costs will also be a priority, via new features such as simplified provisioning and upgrading of systems, according to the slides.
Last month, Aeroxperience was the first to report that Microsoft planned to spend US$1 billion per year on development of the next version of Office, which is referred to by Microsoft employees as Office 14 and is expected to be ready for release in the first half of 2009.

In the Office-related posting, Aeroxperience cited a different PowerPoint presentation apparently created by another Microsoft Denmark employee that was also hosted on the download.microsoft.com site. That presentation has since been taken down by Microsoft, although Aeroxperience still has copies of some of the slides on its web site.

Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the various blog postings related to Windows Seven.