Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb, then Vienna) is a future version of Microsoft Windows. It is expected to be the successor to Windows Vista. Microsoft has confirmed that the planned development time frame is at least three years, putting the release date around 2010. On July 20, 2007, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 7 is “the internal name for the next version of the Windows Client OS”.

Microsoft has refrained from discussing the details about Windows 7 publicly as they focus on the release and marketing of Windows Vista, though some early details of various core operating system features have emerged at developer conferences such as Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in 2006.

Focus

On February 9, 2007, Microsoft’s Ben Fathi claimed that the focus on the operating system was still being worked out, and could merely hint at some possibilities.

“”We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it’s hypervisors. I don’t know what it is” [...] “Maybe it’s a new user interface paradigm for consumers.” ”

Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek, also suggested that the next version of Windows would “be more user-centric.” When asked to clarify what he meant, Gates said:

“ “That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you’ve got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you’re interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else’s PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that’s kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won’t need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We’ll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we’ve got a pretty good outline.”

Other features

Another feature mentioned by Bill Gates is “a pervasive typing line that will recognize the sentence that [the user is] typing in.” The implications of this could be as simple as a “complete as you type” function as found in most modern search engines, (e.g. Google Suggest) or as complex as being able to give verbal commands to the PC without any concern for syntax.

 MinWin

On October 13, 2007, Eric Traut gave a presentation in which he demonstrated a minimalistic variation of the Windows 7 kernel, known as MinWin.

Backward compatibility

The client versions of Windows 7 will ship in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Server versions of Windows 7, however, will be exclusively 64-bit.

[Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vienna]

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