[Mike]

Since we're on the subject of the next "big one" - for those who haven't managed to read it, I've taken the liberty of scan/copying a really good article from the February '08 edition of APC mag, by one of my favourite writers, David Flynn. It's early days but what he talks about here makes for very interesting reading. I just hope we see most of what David suggests and that we don't get our pants pulled down again - it really is time for a revolutionary step (it's been 12 years!) because evolutionary, buggy updates are becoming a little tiresome!

Apologies in advance for any OCR artifacts I may have missed.

[quote]
With Windows Vista having already hit its first anniversary, the countdown clock is ticking on Microsoft's follow-up. We're still in the long dark before the dawn of the next-gen Windows OS, but the earliest signs are encouraging: a new streamlined kernel, an inbuilt VM for running old software, and a revised/simplified Ul. There's every chance that Microsoft intends to see Windows not only rise from the ashes of Vista, but break with the past and do for the decades-old platform what Mac OS X did for Apple.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

You can forget about the earlier codename of Vienna. Newly-minted Windows VP Steven Sinofsky has nixed fancy cyphers and gone back to version numbers, so right now it's simply 'Windows 7.0' (based on iterations of the NT-based kernel, with Vista being Windows 6.0). The final name that appears on the box will be anyone's guess, especially after such unexpected flights of fancy as Me, XP and Vista.

But we've got a hunch that Sinofsky might return to the simple year-based branding which Microsoft introduced with Windows 95 and has since applied to much of its OS and client software. If that's the case, Windows 7 might end up as Windows 2010, based on a Microsoft spokesman's comments during a US sales conference in July 2007 that "Microsoft is scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year timeframe, and then the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar." This means at least three years from Vista's arrival, setting late 2009 to early 2010 as the initial timeframe but marching onwards through 2010 if need be. OK, so maybe it'll be Windows 2011...

KERNEL KNOWLEDGE

We already know that the entire next generation of the Windows family will be built around a stripped-back 'microkernel' codenamed MinWin. An internal project to strip back the NT kernel to the barest of bare metal, MinWin is "the Windows 7 source-code base" and will be used "to build all the products based on Windows" according to Microsoft engineer Eric Traut, who presented a sneak peak of MinWin in October 2007. That 'proof of concept' iteration consisted of just 100 system files, which occupied 25MB of hard disk space and ran in 40MB of RAM. "It's not just the OS that's running on many laptops in this room," said Traut. "It's also the OS used for media centers, for servers, for small embedded devices."

INTERFACE-LIFT

There's no doubt that Windows 7 will sport a revised interface. It was Sinofky's winning gamble to give Office 2007 an all-new Ul which swapped the decades-old clutter of menus, toolbars, task panes and what-not for a single task-aware 'ribbon'. That Ul overhaul was led by Julie Larson-Green, who Sikofsky has since tipped to head the "User Experience" program for Windows 7.

Will the Windows 7 facelift be as revolutionary as that of Office 2007? That's harder to tell, because the change in Office 2007 wasn't made for change's sake: Larsen-Green went back to first principles for the suite, and she's likely to do exactly the same for Windows. Starting with a clean slate, she'll be asking what people expect their computer to do, and then how an OS should fit in with that. But it's safe to say that feral Ul elements such as Vista's' icon overload' Control Panel are not long for this world.

THE RETURN OF WINFS?

More speculative is the question of WinFS, which sits atop the NTFS file system to allow data to be stored, accessed and managed based on relationships with other data. WinFS was originally to use the Yukon database engine of SQL Server 2005 which included native support for XML, but became the first of Vista many 'foundlation pillars' to topple. Despite initial promises that it would be released in the year following the launch of Vista, the last news on WinFS was that some of its technologies have been rolled into the Katmai engine of SQL. Microsoft may well forge ahead with a relationship-savvy file system in Windows 7, built around the Katmai engine, but the'WinFS' label could remain buried.

VIRTUAL MACHINES FOR'LEGACY'SOFTWARE

According to a thread (since removed) on Microsoft's 'Channel 9' community forum site in July 2007, Windows 7 will use virtualisation to run any software that hasn't been specifically written for Windows 7 or using Microsoft's .NET language, OS-based virtualisation makes sense for plenty of reasons. Microsoft already has the technology, in Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualisation system designed for Windows Server 2008. And hardware won't be an issue: by the time Windows 7 arrives circa 2010, quad-core will have replaced dual-core as the mainstream, with substantially larger cache including superslabs of Level 3 cache.

L3 already exists in AMD's 'Barcelona' architecture and has been hinted for Intel's'Nehalem, which will succeed the current Core micro-architecture in the second half of 2008. (In fact, if Windows 7 breaks cover towards the end of 2010, it'll be accompanied by Intel's post-Nehalem Core microarchitecture revision, codenamed Gesher.) Also, considering that Nehalem will debut with eight cores in a single die, there's no reason we couldn't see a string of single cores each being set aside for running a VM, with a flash drive used to hold and launch the virtual machine software in order to dramatically boost session speed, especially during the 'transition states' of startup and shutdown which represent so much of the VM overhead. PCs will also sport obscene amounts of memory: 4GB will likely be equivalent to today's 'entry level' of 1GB with flash drives used in concert with hard drives to actively store files rather than just be a shot-term cache.

A LINE IN THE SAND..?

It's worth noting that virtualisation is comparable to how Mac OS X handles Mac OS 9 software: a 'classic environment' is launched, creating a single self-contained instance of OS 9. Apple used this approach to provide backwards compatibility for old software when customers made the leap from OS 9 to OS X. And it should be remembered that OS X was in fact an all-new operating system, which cleverly sported a Ul that mimicked (yet incrementally improved upon) the more familiar elements of OS 9. Might Microsoft be planning a similar seismic shift, using a radically re-engineered if not almost entirely new version 7 to break with the woes of Windows past? The OS itself has already entered in its second decade, and the 32-bit NT codebase underpinning the current Windows generation is already nudging 15 years from its 1993 launch in Windows NT 3.1. The new Windows would be built from the ground up as an operating system for 2010, while virtualisation would offer the ability to support pre-7'classic'apps (which will mainly be relatively modern XP and Vista software) in standalone sandbox sessions.

While we're trudging the first few miles on the long road to Windows 7, it looks like being a fascinating journey.
[endquote]

Very cool huh?