Microsoft Sets 2006 Target for Next Windows Version
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O said on Friday  it will ship the next version of Windows in 2006, but  scaled  back plans to include a new system for finding and storing  information in its flagship operating system.
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Few major changes in hardware and software are expected until 2006, experts say.
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Microsoft has set 2006 for the official launch of its Longhorn operating system, which will debut without several of the features originally planned.
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Microsoft Corp. said on Wednesday it  plans to release the first major update to its Windows Vista  operating system early next year.
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Microsoft Corp. wants to deliver its Windows Server 2003 update, known as &quot;R2,&quot; in 2005. To make sure it will be able do so, the company is prioritizing its feature list and moving some R2 features into later releases.
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update To get next version of Windows out on time, company says it will delay some planned features.
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Speculation is mounting over what will be in the next version of Windows and when the update will take place.
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By scaling back, company hopes to hit a 2006 release. Microsoft Corp. is dropping a highly touted new feature from its plans for the next generation of Windows -- scaling back ambitions for its biggest product
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(InfoWorld) - By now, everyone has heard how Microsoft 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 thatÂ has become fodder for educated Windows 7 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. "We're three years out, so you can't really expect that much detail." Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said that 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 such newÂ features 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 itsÂ 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 and synchronize devices by placing them on the table. With products like 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. Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this article.
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Microsoft will broadly release its long-awaited new Windows operating system code-named &quot;Longhorn&quot; in 2006, according to a company statement.
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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.
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SEPTEMBER 06, 2004  - The next major Windows release, code-named Longhorn, is due to arrive so far into the future that many corporate users aren&#39;t particularly bothered by Microsoft Corp.
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Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) said on Friday it will ship the next version of Windows in 2006, but  scaled back plans to include a new system for finding and storing information in its flagship operating system.
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Microsoft Corp.  launched  Windows Vista for businesses on Thursday, unveiling the first  major upgrade of its dominant operating system in five years  and predicting that over 200 million people will run new  Windows, Office or PC server software by the end of 2007.
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To get next version of Windows out on time, company to delay some planned features, sources say.
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Windows XP users have until early next year to update business systems and applications before the operating system&#39;s Service Pack (SP) 2 is fully unleashed.
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Microsoft wants to make it easy for users to upgrade among editions of the next Windows.