Details on Microsoft's forthcoming major release, Windows 7, have been few and far between. That, however, looks set to change, beginning today at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, taking place in Carlsbad, Calif., from May 27th to 29th.
At this very conference, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are expected to showcase the first live demonstration of Windows 7.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Microsoft's official Windows Vista Blog has chosen today to start "communicating Windows 7". In a blog post by Microsoft's Chris Flores, we get a few interesting details regarding Microsoft's Vista successor.
After a lengthy assurance of Vista's success and all-round greatness, Flores states:
Contrary to some speculation, Microsoft is not creating a new kernel for Windows 7. Rather, we are refining the kernel architecture and componentization model introduced in Windows Vista. While these changes will increase our engineering agility, they will not impact the user experience or reduce application or hardware compatibility. In fact, one of our design goals for Windows 7 is that it will run on the recommended hardware we specified for Windows Vista and that the applications and devices that work with Windows Vista will be compatible with Windows 7.
We are well into the development process of Windows 7, and we're happy to report that we're still on track to ship approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista. As always, we will be releasing early builds of Windows 7 prior to its general availability as a means to gain feedback, but we're not yet ready to discuss timing and specific plans for any Beta releases. In the meantime, customers can confidently continue with their Windows Vista deployment plans."
Windows Vista was released to the general public on January 30th, 2007. According to Flores, Windows 7 will ship around January 2010, and we can expect beta releases as soon as next year.
Useful links
Windows Vista blog - Communicating Windows 7
D: All Things Digital conference
