Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates indicated Friday that the successor to Microsoft’s Vista operating system will be available sooner than the company previously had indicated.Gates, in response to a question during a public appearance in Miami on Friday, said to expect Windows 7 “sometime in the next year or so.” Gates was speaking at the Inter-American Development Bank in Miami, and didn’t elaborate.
When asked to elaborate on Gates’ remarks, a Microsoft spokesman said Gates was alluding to a test version of the new software, and not the full-on commercial version. The spokesman didn’t offer additional comments outside the statement.
“As is standard with the release of a new product, we will be releasing early builds of Windows 7 prior to its General Availability as a means to gain tester feedback,” according to Microsoft’s statement. “We’re not sharing additional information at this time.”
Microsoft last said it expected a follow-up to its Vista software around January 2010. Should Gates be referring to a full-scale release, his timetable on Friday lops at least a year off the wait.
Well, it’s something to keep an eye on. With the messy (and some would say, incomplete) release of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, it is no small wonder that Microsoft wants a successor out as soon as possible, if for no other reason than to quiet the masses about wanting to keep XP rather than upgrade to Vista.
Microsoft likely may want to give people something else (positive) to desire and talk about, thus drowning out the XP concerns, driving people to a feeling of more acceptance of where things are and that things are “moving forward” so they might as well accept the direction as it would be futile to swim against the current.
With little known about Windows 7, at this point, it’s difficult to get excited or bothered. So, we are at the point of the process where we speculate and wonder, much like most of us did when Longhorn was initially being discussed. The screenshots I have seen of early Windows 7 builds don’t really show very much as it looks much like Vista. Will it be like what Windows 98 was to Windows 95? Not sure at this point but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at that time. Well, outside of essentially purchasing the same operating system again 3 years later but with many of the bugs and quirks and lacking or lagging features brought up to spec. If that’s the case it causes me concern for how far Microsoft plans to take Vista as far as updates and tweaking. If Windows 7 will be essentially a better, updated and more fixed version of Vista then what’s the point of updating Vista to any effective degree? Well, for now, we will occasionally wonder and simply keep an eye out and see what we see.
Posted under Software, Tech News
This post was written by Veg on April 5, 2008
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