At the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft offered the first public glimpse of a post-Vista world Tuesday. Dubbed Windows 7, the new operating system promises faster bootup times, better memory handling, and extensive support for a touch interface.
“We are excited to be delivering a pre-beta developer release of Windows 7 today at PDC2008,” said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group. “With our new approach to planning and development we now have a great foundation for our partners to start learning and innovating on this exciting new version of Windows.”
Attendees at the conference received pre-beta developer releases of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. In addition, Microsoft has set up a Web site for developers to share code, apply for Windows 7 certification, and get updates as the software evolves.
Company executives declined to offer a specific rollout date for the new OS, but gave 2010 as a ballpark figure. A full beta release of Windows 7 is scheduled for sometime next year.
There is some suggestion that the pending rollout of Windows 7 will slow the implementation of Vista, particularly in corporate environments. In a keynote address at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer conceded that was a possibility.
“If people want to wait, they really can,” said Ballmer. “But I’d definitely deploy Vista.”
He took issue, however, with the notion that Vista has performed below expectations, both in terms of sales and ease of implementation, although he conceded some early compatibility issues.
“The adoption rate of Vista is faster than the adoption rate was of XP two years in,” he said. “We had a great success with security and are starting to see a ramp with adoption.”
The Windows 7 feature…