http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/oct/14/windows-7-microsoftMicrosoft has officially revealed the name of the successor to Windows Vista, and it's not Vista II, ReVista or AltaVista
Comments (18)
The shocking revelation on Microsoft's Vista blog is that the final name of what we now call Windows 7 will be… Windows 7. Mike Nash, corporate vice-president, Windows Product Management, says: "Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore Windows 7 just makes sense."
Well, it is certainly true that the previous version – Vista – was Windows 6, but I'm not convinced at this stage that Windows 7 merits a 1.0 increase. Windows XP was only a 0.1 increase on Windows 2000, and that probably had more changes than Windows 7 will bring. After all, the interesting stuff will be how Windows 7 relates to Windows Live and Live Mesh – or doesn't. (I'd expect the US Justice Department to block the sort of innovations that would be really good for consumers on the grounds that they'd be good for Microsoft as well. Can't allow that!)
Microsoft will be handing out a pre-beta "developer only release" at PDC at the end of the month, and at WinHEC, which follows.
It will be interesting to see how Windows 7 is received, because then we might have some idea whether it will appear in February 2010 (or thereabouts) or whether Microsoft might get it out before Christmas. Either would arguably be "on schedule". After all, Microsoft delayed the public release of Vista until after Christmas, so as not to disadvantage PC retail suppliers who feared they would be stuck selling old fashioned and obsolete Windows XP machines…
After that, roll on Windows 8 and Windows 9! There's plenty of virtualisation stuff that's worth doing and probably isn't going to make it into Windows 7, and (for the benefit of the particularly clueless) every numbered release is really a snapshot of what's actually a continuous work in progress. That's true of Mac OS X as well.
