Microsoft: Vista Follow-up Likely in 2009
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Microsoft is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to a company executive.
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Within its recent response to the U.S. Department of Justice that stated it would modify Windows Vista to enable end users and OEMs to change the default desktop search it uses, Microsoft for the first time discussed Service Pack 1 for the OS, saying a beta will come this year.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on  Thursday that more than 200 million users will be using one of  its new products -- including its highly-anticipated Windows  Vista operating system, Office 2007 software suite and Exchange  server -- by the end of 2007.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ could pull the trigger on putting out a beta of the first service pack for Windows Vista any day with a final release by November, sources close to the company said. Microsoft has been mum about exactly what will be included in Windows Vista Service Pack 1, a rollup of updates for the OS, many of which are pushed out automatically through its Web-based update services. The company also has not said when the software will be in final release --Â the latest from the company revealed only that a beta will be out sometime before the end of the year. The WinBeta.org blog reported Tuesday in a post that Microsoft 's WDK (Windows Driver Kit) team sent out an e-mail to beta testers that a new build of the WDK was being released to them to coincide "with the recent OS beta release for Vista SP1 Preview," hinting that SP1 beta is soon to be sent to testers. Others speculate Microsoft might release the SP1 beta Thursday, the day it will report the company's fiscal 2007 fourth quarter and year-end financial results. In an interview Wednesday, one source close to the company said he had been told by insiders that a beta of SP1 would be out by now, so an imminent release is highly likely. And another source said that beta testers report SP1 will definitely be out this week with a final release coming in November or December. At Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver two weeks ago, Mike Sievert, corporate vice president of the Windows business group at Microsoft, toed the party line on Vista SP1 and said little about when it would be released or what would be in it and hinted that Microsoft's own plans for the service pack are still in flux. Sievert also downplayed the software's role in when some Windows users will upgrade to Vista, though it's widely known many users -- especially business and enterprise customers -- are waiting for SP1 before replacing Windows XP with Vista. "Most companies are still in the evaluation phase," he said in an interview. "Service pack or no service pack, they're still looking at what they will deploy."
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Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said the Windows Vista operating system is still on track for early January shipment.
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A beta of the first service pack for Windows Vista could come any day now, with a final release by November, sources close to the company say.
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In response to media coverage and pressure from partners, Microsoft finally opened up about Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Wednesday, detailing what customers should expect of the update, and setting a final release date of Q1 2008.
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(InfoWorld) - Adoption of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista operating system will happen at a faster pace than any previous operating system release, a software analyst predicted last week. Up to 15 percent of PC users will move to Vista within the first year that the operating system is available, said David Mitchell, the software practice leader at Ovum Ltd. "That would make it the fastest-moving operating system ever," he said. By comparison, between 12 to 14 percent of users switched to Windows XP during the first year of its release, Mitchell said. Vista will gain traction in the market from quick adoption by both corporate and consumer users. For example, companies that participate in Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing program will automatically get upgrades to Vista, Mitchell said. "On the consumer side, there has been a bit of pent-up demand. Just look at the beta adoption in the consumer space -- it's very high," he said. Windows Vista will be available to business customers from November 30, with the operating system available to consumers from January. For users who buy a new computer before Vista is released to consumers, Microsoft is now shipping Vista upgrade coupons with computers that are sold with Windows XP. The upgrade coupons mean that Microsoft will not be hurt financially by missing the year-end holiday shopping season -- a peak time for computer sales. While corporate and consumer users will quickly move to Vista, the adoption prospects forÂ Office 2007 -- which goes on sale at the same time -- are less clear. While many users may now see no need to upgrade, once Office 2007 starts to make its way into companies users may find themselves upgrading to keep pace, Mitchell said. Overall, the rate of adoption of Office 2007 will be lower than Vista during the first year, Mitchell said. "You don't get the OEM drag effect. If you buy a new PC, you get a copy of Vista. You don't necessarily get a copy of Office," he said. Â
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(InfoWorld) - To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the mega OS release has been greatly exaggerated, Microsoft's COO said this week. In a part-speech, part-presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, COO Kevin Turner echoed comments made earlier this year by CEO Steve Ballmer that Windows Vista is not the last major update of the company's client operating system. Tuesday, as Turner dubbed Vista and the simultaneously-unveiled Office 2007 "huge, big-dog releases," he also promised more would come. "Certainly, this last year has been an unprecedented year for Vista and Office and the launch," Turner said. "And we are still committed to the desktop. There will be another release and launch of a Vista-type operating system. [And] there will be another release of Office." Turner's assertions parroted those made by Ballmer Jan. 29, just before Vista and Office 2007 went to retail. In New York on the launch eve, Ballmer said Microsoft had "plenty more where that came from," referring to Vista and its follow-on. At the time, speculation had mounted over whether Microsoft would, or even could, again mount a Vista-sized effort, in part because Ballmer himself had sworn that the company would never again take five years to craft a new OS. Analysts and pundits, meanwhile, were predicting the decline of the desktop operating system's importance as Web 2.0 applications made inroads and companies like Google offered apps and other tools that ran on any browser. Microsoft, their thinking went, would be forced to update its platforms, whether operating system or application, much more frequently and with smaller-scale upgrades to mimic the always-updated Web. Microsoft did concede some points there. For post-Vista development, Microsoft said it would return to a goal of releasing major OS upgrades every four years with at least one minor release between each major. There's reason -- more than one, actually -- for Turner taking the time to repeat the message, said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "You don't want this audience to abandon Windows, so it's important to remind them that Windows is still the most interesting operating system to develop for," Cherry said. Such reminders are especially important now, added Cherry, because of a July survey that said the percentage of developers targeting Windows had declined 12 percent in the past year. But Microsoft has other reasons for belaboring the point. "It's obvious that there will be future major operating system releases," Turner said. "There will be thinner OSes, certainly, and some may choose to use them. But there will be changes to hardware that will require changes in the OS, and fundamentally, as the number of changes add up or the significance of what you're changing does, the more important it is to do a major update." Incremental updates, in other words, only take you so far. "We always talk about the operating system as the pipes and the rest as the fixtures, right? Well, this is like when you're remodeling a house. There is a certain amount of things you can do in the bathroom. You can change the shower head, say. But you can't move the shower to another room without changing the pipes." On other topics Tuesday, Turner urged Microsoft partners to cash in on the 2007 releases of Vista and Office. "You know what I see? I see one thing in FY [fiscal year] '08, I see money," Turner said. "I see monetization. I can smell it and hear it, see it, okay, because this is the year that we're going to monetize that innovation."
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With Vista just out the door, Microsoft Corp. is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product's core components.
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(InfoWorld) - Forget the "7" code name, which was already out there, or the 2010 release date, which was also neither new nor -- based on Microsoft's lately abysmal record with hitting major release dates -- exactly set in stone. The most concrete news to come out of Microsoft's well-executed leak of a few sparse details about the next version of Windows is that it will continue to come in both 32- and 64-bit editions. That will cause many Windows users, primarily businesses, to sigh with relief. PC vendors and large software makers, who see more-powerful 64-bit PCs as key to driving demand for both hardware and software in an increasingly Web-centric world, are likely to have a very different reaction. Bits of the solution The number of bits determines how large the chunks of data a component of the PC can process, which determines how much data it can handle and ultimately howÂ  fast it can perform. For instance, '80s-era PCs with hybrid 8/16-bit architectures were limited to a maximum of 64KB of RAM. In contrast, a modern PC running a 32-bit version of Windows XP can utilize up to 4GB of RAM. Meanwhile, 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista can support up to 128GB of physical RAM and 16TB of almost-as-fast virtual memory. Combined, the two techniques can offer steep performance boosts for software ported from 32-bit to 64-bit. And they enable software such as database-driven or multimedia applicationsÂ  that were formerly infeasible on 32-bit PCs. Since 2004, 64-bit processors for desktop PCs have been available from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. Microsoft followed, releasing 64-bit versions of XP and Windows Server 2003 in the middle of the following year. But while 64-bit server adoption roars along, the process has been much slower on the desktop side. 32-bit software and drivers can be buggy or demonstrate scant performance improvement in 64-bit environments. Those problems can arise even if users are simply moving from 32- to 64-bit editions of the same version of Windows, such as XP. When under-the-hood changes don't result in better performance, customers will be happy tweaking what they already have. For instance, during Microsoft's quarterly financial forecast last week, the company lowered its year-ahead forecast for Vista shipments vs. XP, from 85 percent/15 percent to 78 percent/22 percent. From 16 to 32, a smooth move The last time around, Microsoft was gentle in moving users from 16-bit to 32-bit, taking a decade to complete the transition. Starting with 1990's Windows 3.0 and finishing with 2000's Windows ME, Microsoft released five versions of Windows supporting both 16-bit and 32-bit. In comparison, Windows 7 will be only the third Windows version, after 64-bit XP's arrival in 2005, to sport dual 32/64-bit compatibility. Apple has a similar hybrid strategy. Its upcoming Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a. "Leopard," is a true 64-bit environment that will ostensibly also offer full compatibility with 32-bit applications on, for instance, older PowerPC-based Mac hardware. Companies, especially those running esoteric or in-house-written applications, will be the happiest to hear that Windows 7 will still support 32-bit software, since it will allow them to avoid expensive rewrites if they decide to upgrade. It will also be welcomed by Microsoft salespeople, systems integrators, and value-added resellers, who will have more options to offer cost-conscious customers. PC makers and big independent software vendors who may have hoped that Microsoft would push customers harder to 64-bit will be the least happy. 64-bit enables developers to add features and let desktop applications run much faster. Those are much-needed differentiators, now that users are taking serious looks at software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as Google Office. Similarly, because SaaS applications' performance is more dependent upon the Web site's architecture and the user's broadband link, they don't require ultrapowerful PCs. That could remove the need for users to upgrade -- hurting the PC market, or so fear vendors.
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Microsoft Corp. today released Windows Vista Release Candidate 2 (RC2), which it expects to be the last release of the OS before it goes to manufacturing.
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(InfoWorld) - With Vista just out the door, MicrosoftÂ is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product's core components. That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP, but Vista was exceptional, said Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division this week at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco. Microsoft originally planned for its XP follow-up to include a number of radical changes to Windows, including a new file system and a reinvented user interface, but after the company's products were hit by widespread worm outbreaks in 2003, Microsoft redirected almost its entire engineering effort to locking down Windows with the XP Service Pack 2 release. "We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release." Vista shipped about two-and-a-half years after XP SP 2, and Vista's follow-up is expected to take about the same amount of time, according to Fathi. "You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with," he said. "That's a good timeframe for refresh." That time line would put Microsoft's next client operating system out by the end of 2009. Last year, Microsoft said that the code name for this Vista follow-up is Vienna, but Fathi said he could not disclose the current name. "We've been told not to use it publicly," he said. So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna? According to Fathi, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers." "It's too early for me to talk about it," he added. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
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Microsoft Corp. said it plans to release the next version of its Windows operating system as expected in 2006, but it will not include much-touted new technology for organizing and storing data.
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Microsoft will announce availability of business versions of its long-awaited Vista operating system on Thursday, according to analysts invited to a release event in New York City.
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In an interview, Ben Fathi, the Microsoft executive in charge of Windows development, said he thinks Windows Vista is on track to meet his goal of the new OS having half the flaws that Windows XP did in its first year.
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Microsoft promises -- in 2006. The market expected the new desktop operating system in 2004, but the company was distracted with security concerns as it marshaled its forces to finish the Windows XP Service Pack 2.