Microsoft’s Next OS To Be Called “Windows 7″. Seriously

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/13/microsofts-next-version-of-windows-to-be-called-windows-7-seriously/

by jasonlbaptiste • 18 years ago

19 40 18 years ago

techcrunch.com

mixmax• 18 years ago

Going by the numbers this should be a serious downgrade from windows 2000

unalone• 18 years ago

It's a sort of reversal of how they expanded their numbers with the XBox 360, so it wouldn't be a 2 versus the PS3.

Still, I like it. It's no-nonsense and it's got a nice ring to it.

brianherman• 18 years ago

I love it!

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

Functional. Simple. Easier to get businesses to buy 7.5 or 8.0 instead of switching from "XP" to "Vista". I like it.

jmtame• 18 years ago

I better be impressed, or I'm sticking with XP.

cstejerean3• 18 years ago

not for long you won't, unless you're going to start writing your own security patches and backporting apps.

jonny_noog4• 18 years ago

Or he'll have moved to a Mac by then?

Disclaimer: I don't own a Mac... Yet.

whacked_new• 18 years ago

MS's blog post linked: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/...

This did not need an entire blog post. The title's one liner sums it up fine.

dmix• 18 years ago

That blogs design hurts my eyes. Its pure form over function.

Who decided to use white text on a nearly white background for the navigation?

icey3• 18 years ago

The same people who thought UAC was a good idea.

jrockway• 18 years ago

it’s probably going to confuse everyone and couldn’t be more bland

Probably not. It is a little bland, but there is nothing all that exciting about an OS like Windows. Its most exciting function is drawing window decorations and showing icons on your desktop. Who cares?

breck• 18 years ago

Agreed. I think it couldn't be less confusing. I love the name and look forward to it coming out(still on XP, definitely going to skip Vista). I hope it has built in version control, faster file search, and no stupid security pop ups. Also, could we please get a better version of Paintbrush?

RKlophaus• 18 years ago

I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm worried about Windows as a platform.

The code base has now been recycled 5 times over, and they keep adding layers to it instead of cleaning it up.

(One thing I admire about Apple. When the OS code got old and crufty, they weren't afraid to start at the beginning and do it right.)

Windows has had to promise and deliver complete backward compatibility to retain their market share. They've painted themselves into a corner, and at a certain point, they are going to have to break that promise or figure out some clever way to unchain themselves from that anchor. (I think I read something about them trying virtualization as a possible solution.)

snprbob862• 18 years ago

Windows 7 is breaking application binary compatibility. My understanding is that if your executable's manifest does not specify 7, then you get <= Vista. The next version will provide <= Vista, 7, and 8. And so on.

I may have misunderstood, but this seems like it will relieve many compatibility woes.

Zev2• 18 years ago

Apple's start-from-the-beginning effort was Copland. That turned out pretty badly for Apple. (Which is part of the reason they abandoned it in favor of buying NeXTSTEP (Which turned into OS X))

helveticaman• 18 years ago

But in a way, Copland wasn't Steve Jobs, but NeX was. Apple is Steve Jobs.

shiranaihito• 18 years ago

> I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm worried about Windows as a platform.

I'm worried that it might still dominate the world after 5 years.

gaius• 18 years ago

Windows has had to promise and deliver complete backward compatibility to retain their market share. They've painted themselves into a corner

I think that's correlation, not causation. Look at Sun and their Solaris backwards-compatibility guarantee (which is, if your old binaries break on our new version, it's our bug and we'll fix it).

cturner• 18 years ago

    The code base has now been recycled 5 times over, and
    they keep adding layers to it instead of cleaning it up.

There have been lots of stupid extensions - technologies in the space we call COM - but they don't reflect on the core. And with the core - they've cleaned it up multiple times. Microsoft have been excellent at doing incremental releases with the exception of Vista. Everything else (including Windows 95) has just been a steady increment on the previous version. Dot net is an attempt to create a clean new alternative stack to allow them to stablise the legacy system so they can get it stable and then just leave it.

With NT3 they did as little as possible by taking lots of inspiration from OS2 but fixing up the things it got wrong such as single input queue. What were the major features improvements of Windows 2000 over NT4? Some steady interface improvements that were already available for NT4 as a patch, plus you could change IP addresses without rebooting. XP over 2000? More annoying user interface, support for some new hardware.

Also, you say 'recycled'? It has and respects legacy, and I agree that this holds it back - there are certain things about the core that are awful and hard-wired that way for the rest of time. One of the major reasons I avoid it for anything more than running browsers and office is that I can't stand the command-line limitations. But code doesn't get worn out through reuse. The major criticism I'd have of Vista is that they were so carried away by the prospect of duplicating the ridiculous operating environment that I hate about my OSX environment that they didn't recycle enough!

    (One thing I admire about Apple. When the OS code got old
    and crufty, they weren't afraid to start at the beginning
    and do it right.)

They didn't though. They just rolled NeXT forward and wrote compatibility layers for the Apple stuff. I can't cite this exactly, but when he was launching NeXT, Jobs said something along the lines of "it's late, but there may just be enough time left to establish one more workstation platform". And really they cheated because it's just unix with their own GUI.

schtog• 18 years ago

Windows 7 != Midori ?

snprbob862• 18 years ago

No, Midori is something very different...

bigthboy• 18 years ago

Personally, I think Vista should have kept the name "Longhorn" from development. I like the sound of "Windows 7" but I too am a bit concerned with how Windows in itself will fare with a future that looks like Vista which was, in my opinion, a step away from the enterprise class that Windows has always had a firm grasp on. As someone who works in IT for a university and has worked for other schools in the past, I found Vista showed no reasons to be used in an enterprise setting. Vista tailored WAY too much to a home user perspective. All pretty pictures and no power.

Windows 7, we can perhaps expect a step back in the right direction. I've seen rumors but nothing official that suggested Windows 7 was going to be Microsoft's first Operating system since Windows 2000 to not use the NT core? Anyone care to confirm that?

Also... just some funnies... http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/13/windows-7-the-search-for-a...

timcederman• 18 years ago

3.1, NT, 95, 98, ME, XP, 2000, Vista, 7 -- just pick a scheme and stick with it guys.

icey3• 18 years ago

You forgot about Bob

Zev2• 18 years ago

Wasn't that just a new UI, not a new OS completely?

greenagain• 18 years ago

But they told me it was going to be called Mojave.

trezor• 18 years ago

Next up we hit Windows XP, which has served most of us reasonably well since 2001. It sounds sort of cool, it’s catchy, and we have no idea what it means.

I thought it was commonplace knowledge within the geek community that XP was short for "eXPerience"?

If he is going to go on a long rant commenting on the name of different Windows-releases, he should at least know the topic he is talking about ;)

baha_man• 18 years ago

"I thought it was commonplace knowledge within the geek community that XP was short for "eXPerience"?"

It's news to me. I think it's still fair to say that the name "doesn't really mean anything".

pmjordan• 18 years ago

That makes the rant even more pointless.

newt0311• 18 years ago

Seriously, why does the name matter?

crowbar• 18 years ago

Darn. And I had all my money on Windows EX Hyper Fighting Alpha: The New Challengers Turbo.

Microsoft’s Next OS To Be Called “Windows 7″. Seriously

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