Windows 7 to Include Multitouch

Microsoft is finally opening up about when Windows 7 will ship, but the company continues to share just a few, yet tantalizing details of what the eagerly anticipated OS update will be all about.



Microsoft Windows 7 to Include Multitouch Features

The latest tidbit to drop is multitouch interface support. At the Wall St. Journal's D Conference Tuesday evening in Carlsbad, Calif., company founder and chief software architect Bill Gates and chief executive Steve Ballmer are scheduled to unveil a laptop with a touchscreen that accepts multiple, simultaneous touches. The effect is quite reminiscent of what's possible with the world's most popular, commercially available gesture-based interface device: the iPhone.

Officially, Windows 7 is scheduled to ship three years after the general availability of Windows Vista, according to Microsoft. Vista's business editions launched on Nov. 30, 2006, which would mean the software could ship as early as that date in 2009, with a beta release in advance. Vista's editions for the home market launched Jan. 29, 2007.

To be fair, this is not Microsoft's first foray into the multitouch arena. The company's innovative "Surface" computing platform, which combines cameras to sense the gestures and touches of either a single user or multiple users, allowing them to interact with a table-top full of digital objects. Surface then uses a projector to project the image onto a screen. Windows 7 would use touchscreen technology to achieve similar effects.

Microsoft would not say specifically whether the OS will support gestures as well as multitouch support, like Surface does. Given the gesture support in Apple's products, however, something similar is likely.

A video posted on Microsoft Windows Client Communications Team Director Chris Flores' blog shows the interface on a laptop and table-mounted LCD screen. During that demonstration a user edits and manipulates photos with his fingertips, navigates a map and plays a virtual piano.

A spokesperson for Microsoft said the company is "working closely with OEMs, IHVs and ISVs to bring the best touch experiences to Windows PCs. The Windows and Surface teams are also working together closely to deliver the best and most innovative touch experiences to customers."

"Touch is quickly becoming a common way of directly interacting with software and devices," Flores wrote on his blog, in something of a validation of the touch and gesture based platform introduced on Apple's iPhone. "Touch-enabled surfaces are popping up everywhere including laptop touch pads, cell phones, remote controls, GPS devices, and more."

Windows 7 Due in 2009

Microsoft hints that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009.

Will Microsoft Deliver Windows 7 Next Year?

Microsoft has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations.

It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies.

Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched until January 2007. Given Microsoft's recent track record - Vista arrived more than five years after XP - most outsiders had pegged some time in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7's arrival.

But News.com reported Friday that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates answered a question at a business meeting in Miami about Windows Vista by saying "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version."

And during its announcement Thursday that it would extend the availability of Windows XP Home for low-cost laptops, Microsoft said it would retire the operating system only after June 30, 2010, or one year after the release of Windows 7, whichever comes later.

That implies that Microsoft is targeting the middle of next year for some sort of release milestone for Windows 7 - the only codename known at the moment - though whether that would be a final release to consumers or an RTM, which allows businesses and OEMs to start installing it, is unknown.

A Microsoft spokeswoman, in an e-mail, said the company "is in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA." She said the company was providing early builds of the new operating system to gain user feedback, but otherwise was not providing further information.

Gates also said that he was "super-enthused about what [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways" but didn't elaborate.

What could those be? Microsoft has divulged a few things. Responding to criticism that Windows has become unnecessarily bloated, the company has 200 engineers developing a slimmed-down kernel called MinWin that uses 100 files and 25MB, compared to Vista's 5,000 files and 4GB core and is so small it lacks a graphical subsystem.

Microsoft has also confirmed that the operating system will come in consumer and business versions and in 32-bit and 64-bit editions.

Screenshots of early betas of Windows 7 are also appearing. Blogger Paul Thurrott yesterday put up screenshots from build 6519 of Windows 7 released in December, which he said looks like "a slightly enhanced version of Windows Vista."

Microsoft needs to start generating excitement about its software months or years in advance in order to prepare its millions of reselling partners.

But if it talks up Windows 7 too much, it runs the risk that large companies -- Microsoft's most profitable customer segment -- will hold on to their Windows XP machines and skip Vista entirely in favor of Windows 7.

That appears to be happening. A recent enterprise survey by Forrester Research Inc. showed that only 6.3% of enterprises were running Vista at the end of December, with most of the upgrades coming at the expense of aging machines running Windows 2000, not XP.

The vast majority of the 100 million copies of Vista that Microsoft has sold so far have gone to individuals and small businesses purchasing new PCs.

The least-loved version of Windows has long been Windows Millennium Edition (ME), a buggy minor upgrade that was superseded by XP within a year of its release. Despite its far greater - some would say, too great - technical ambition, Vista may end up lumped together with ME as one of the blips on Windows' long-term roadmap.

Windows 7 For Review

The next-generation version of Windows (code name Windows 7) will face an antitrust review by U.S. regulators.

Microsoft Submits Windows 7 for U.S. Antitrust Review


Microsoft has submitted the follow-up to Windows Vista to the committee that oversees its U.S. antitrust compliance, to ensure the operating system is meeting the terms of the company's agreement with the government.

According to last week's status report on the U.S. antitrust case, Microsoft "recently supplied" the Technical Committee (TC) with a build of the OS, code-named Windows 7, and the TC will "conduct middleware-related tests on future builds" of the software. The move was revealed in papers filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The filing was part of regular status reports aimed at tracking Microsoft's compliance with the 2002 antitrust settlement, which requires the company to ensure its own applications do not have an unfair advantage over competitive software that runs on Windows. The agreement also requires Microsoft to make sure its software can work well with third-party applications. Lack of compliance with a 2004 antitrust agreement in the European Union has cost Microsoft nearly US$2.6 billion to date; the E.U.'s most recent fine against the company last month was $1.3 billion.

Those on the TC so far are the only ones privy to what the follow-up to Vista will look like. Microsoft is mum on details of the software. But recent company moves and revelations hint at what can be expected from the software, which is due for release in late 2009 or early 2010.
At the MIX 08 conference in Las Vegas last week, Microsoft revealed Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) -- technology that likely will be a part of Windows 7, though Microsoft has not linked the two products yet.

Microsoft demonstrated IE 8, showing mainly developer improvements, but also some new end-user features such as one called "Activities." Activities allows users to highlight any word or phrase on a Web site and then choose from a drop-down box list of further actions they can take around that information, such as doing a Live Search or searching MSNBC for more information.

Aside from IE 8, little on the record is known about Windows 7, and the word from Microsoft is that it will talk about the OS when it's good and ready. Analyst warn against expecting Windows 7 to be a blockbuster release, given the fallout Microsoft is still dealing with from delivering a late and, to many, disappointing Windows Vista.

Recent court papers in a class-action suit over Microsoft's "Vista Capable" sticker program revealed that even Microsoft executives such as Steven Sinofsky, the senior vice president of Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, were having driver- and application-compatibility problems with Vista after its release. In those papers, revealed in e-mails made public in what has become a class-action suit in a Seattle U.S. District Court, executives made statements to the effect that they won't let the delays and myriad problems associated with Vista happen again.

Mike Cherry, an analyst with research group Directions on Microsoft, said that for Windows 7, Microsoft will likely keep the bells and whistles to a minimum so they can deliver "something reasonable they can complete by a reasonable date ... Their goal will be to try to put Vista behind them," he said.

Because of its compatibility problems and hardware requirements, Microsoft is still struggling to inspire businesses to move from XP to Vista. Some business users have even suggested that companies may skip Vista altogether and hold on to Windows XP for a little longer so they can migrate from that to Windows 7.

On the consumer side, Microsoft already had to extend the length of time it would allow OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and retail outlets to sell XP-based PCs by five months. The deadline for retailers and OEMs is now June 30, but that may be extended, as chip maker Intel expects low-cost desktops and notebooks running its Atom processors to hit the market in the third quarter. Given Vista's hardware requirements, those computers presumably will run XP, though Microsoft maintains it is committed to the June deadline to take the OS off the market.

To remedy these problems, Cherry suggested that Microsoft might serve itself well by making Windows 7 a stable release for business users by using the same code base as the recently released Windows Server 2008. He said Microsoft's mistake with Vista was to try to serve consumers and business customers with a flashy release that added a host of multimedia functionality instead of taking into consideration practical concerns that would affect performance and compatibility.

"It would seem to me that what we really need [is] for a business edition to be built off of that server code, so it would look much less fancy than Vista, much more austere with not a lot of wasted functionality," he said.

Businesses Might Skip Windows Vista

With Microsoft's plan of releasing the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7, in late 2009 or early 2010, there's a strong possibility that business might skip Vista altogether


Will Businesses Skip Vista Altogether?

Windows Vista will be available to consumers and business for one year on November 30, and yet many Windows users are still waiting for the Vista service pack before upgrading. But with Microsoft's plan of releasing the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7, in late 2009 or early 2010, Windows users might skip Vista and in favor of the new version.

On Wednesday, Microsoft reported that more and more third party vendors are writing software and configuring hardware that are Vista compatible, along with drivers that should iron out the incompatibilities that plagued older hardware.

According to Mike Nash, a vice president of product management for Windows client, the experience of running Vista on hardware that is certified for it "is a lot better today than it was a month ago and certainly a lot better than it was [last November]."

Along with Windows Server 2008, Microsoft will release the roll-up updates for Windows Vista in the first quarter next year. The company is hoping that companies will upgrade to both versions.

Even with optimistic reports of Microsoft about Windows Vista, users are still complaining with enough problems that some companies may opt to wait until Windows 7 before upgrading their desktops. However, Microsoft has not disclosed much detail about Windows 7 except that it will be released about three years after Vista.

Users complain that Vista doesn't run well with older hardware -- either on PCs or with connected devices like printers that are a year or two old. Even on PCs that are supposedly meant to be optimized for Vista, there are still odd performance and compatibility issues with certain devices, applications and OS features that make using it a less than optimal experience

For this reason, one East Coast IT consultant who specializes in Microsoft products said that unless Windows Vista SP1 really smooths over the problems people are having with Vista, "there's a good chance many people will hold on to XP until the next version of Windows.

"They're just so many little usability issues," said the consultant, who asked not to be named, but who has nearly 20 years of experience with Microsoft software. "I can just imagine when the next one comes out, Microsoft will actually get it right and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief."