Windows 7 (the Vista Killer?) to be Released at the End of 2009.
Microsoft announced fairly recently that Windows 7, the next desktop release to replace Vista, will be generally available at the end of next year.
Microsoft must be feeling the heat with the slow corporate Vista adoption to make this announcement. Making an announcement like this is tantamount to saying, "we recognize that you just don't have the Vista love. But wait, we've got an update coming up soon." The cconsequence of Windows 7's accelerated release will likely force many enterprises to make hard decisions about which O/S they want to upgrade to.
Windows 7 is a compelling release. Its touted to be smaller, faster, and operate on less powerful (and expensive) hardware. That alone would make an upgrade decision to Vista seem very difficult for many enterprises.
So what's exciting about Windows 7? Read on...
There's been very little released about the feature sets associated with Windows 7, but one major change is a reconfiguration of its core components -- something called MinWin. From Wikipedia:
A minimalistic variation of the Windows kernel, known as MinWin, is being developed for use in Windows 7. The MinWin development efforts are aimed towards componentizing the Windows kernel and reducing the dependencies with a view to carving out the minimal set of components required to build a self-contained kernel as well as reducing the disk footprint and memory usage. MinWin takes up about 25 MB on disk and has a working set (memory usage) of 40 MB. It lacks a graphical user interface and is interfaced using a full-screen command line interface. It includes the I/O and networking subsystems. MinWin was first demonstrated on October 13, 2007 by Eric Traut. The demo system included an OS image, made up of about 100 files, on which a basic HTTP server was running.Incidentally, the name MinWin was also used earlier to refer to what is currently known as Server Core in Windows Server 2008. However, the two are quite different. While both efforts are to consolidate and componentize the core of Windows, with server core, the functionality of the OS is constrained according to server roles, and unneeded components (which will never be used as the role isn't supported) are removed from the binary image. However, the dependencies still exist in code, and the code cannot compile without the components. In contrast, with MinWin, the dependencies are consolidated into MinWin and what is not needed is removed at the code level itself. As a result, the code compiles even without any extraneous components and builds a stripped-down self-contained OS kernel image.
If you're interested in learning more, check out the references cited in this Wikipedia post.
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Comments
Isn't wikipedia not much more than a blog? I don’t trust it much anymore after I found out who was editing it.
Anyway, Windows 7? Ha! After all this time, there's no doubt Vista has become the second Millennium (remember ME?) of the new millennium. This is the second big $$ product from M$ that should have never left the lab. Add to that the bomb of the “Zune”, and flat sales for Office 2007, and this company needs to seriously ask itself "where is it going tomorrow?" More importantly, sans Gates, who will lead them?
There’ll always be a Microsoft, just like there still is an IBM, but I never thought I’d see them grow so old so fast. Ask anyone under 30 who IBM is. So sorry to you fade into history MS, we’ll miss ya.
I'm off to the Apple store first thing tommorrow.
Posted by: Joe | January 25, 2008 12:10 AM