Windows Factor

Microsoft’s 2008 conference dance card is starting to fill in. It’s looking like a very busy February and March for the conference-going set. And, as usual with Microsoft, mid-summer will be full of Microsoft industry and insider events.

The biggest questions going into 2008 is how, when and if Microsoft will share more about its Windows futures plans with developers, partners and customers.

Microsoft has postponed its annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) to some time in the fall of 2008. Usually, WinHEC is a May event. And there’s still no word on when and if the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) will take place in 2008. Microsoft “postponed” the PDC, which was slated for the fall of 2007, and so far has not rescheduled it.

WinHEC and PDC are Microsoft’s biggest Windows-roadmap events of the year. But given that Microsoft will be in a ramp-up period in 2008 — with no new Windows 7 or Windows Server 7 bits ready to share — it’s going to be tough to come up with show content that looks ahead instead of back. (TechEd conferences, which usually are more focused on shipping products, not futures, are the primary venues for that.)

Windows 7 isn’t expected to ship until 2010. Windows Server 7, if Microsoft sticks to schedule, could hit around 2010, as well. Both products will be in the early milestone phase, at best, by next year. Given Microsoft’s reticence to talk about unannounced Windows products, I’m wondering what the Softies will have to say at WinHEC 2008 and, if it happens, PDC 2008. Stay tuned….

Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft learned some hard lessons with Windows Vista that it already is applying to Windows 7.

First and foremost: Keep Windows architectural changes to a minimum. And secondly, be more predictable (and believable) when it comes to delivery targets.

That’s according to Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President of Windows Product Management, who is chatting this week with press and bloggers about the state of Vista, just about a year after the company released the product to manufacturing.

Nash isn’t apologizing for Microsoft’s decision to introduce User Account Control prompts, default to standard-user mode (instead of administrator) or move the graphics subsystem out of the kernel space — all choices the company made in developing Vista. Nor does he think it was a mistake for Microsoft to delay the final RTM of Vista, resulting in the company missing last year’s lucrative holiday retail season.

Nash said Microsoft had to make the under-the-cover changes it did, for security and performance reasons, to Windows Vista.

“I don’t regret that we made a lot of changes to Vista,” Nash said in an interview on November 14. “But I don’t anticipate that level of architectural change in Windows 7.”

Microsoft hasn’t said explicitly what it plans to do to minimize disruptions from any internal changes it does make with Windows 7.

Source: All About Microsoft

Don’t get too excited about the list of Windows 7 feedback that select community members provided to Microsoft – a ranked list of which ran on Neowin.net this past weekend.

As ArsTechnica noted (repeatedly, to its credit) in its coverage, the list will have little — and more likely absolutely no — bearing on what Microsoft ends up incorporating into Windows 7.

Microsoft collected feedback in December 2006 from invited participants regarding features and functionality they’d like to see the company include in future Windows releases. In July 2007, some of that feedback leaked to the Web. This past weekend, Neowin.Net posted what they said was a list from the team in charge of Microsoft’s Early Feedback Program of “(what they consider to be) the top 61 suggestions to be presented to the development team of Windows 7.”

On the Windows 7 request list: Everything from new entertainment packages to be delivered as “Ultimate Extras,” to saving desktop icon arrangements, to more “Notify Only” options in Automatic Updates.

While the list is interesting, in terms highlighting what users want in future Windows releases, it’s somewhat disturbing that this feedback seemingly will have little or no impact on what Microsoft’s planning to build. ArsTechnica quotes “anonymous sources at Microsoft” who say that the itemized list ” bear(s) no relationship to the actual feature set Microsoft is currently writing for Windows 7.”

From other feedback, it sounds as if Microsoft’s already well on its way to planning and coding Windows 7, even though it isn’t slated to hit until 2010.

Source: All About Microsoft

Long Zheng: It’s rare for a week to go by without a few interesting Microsoft job advertisements. One of which posted last week provides a pretty good idea at how the next version of Windows will improve the wireless networking experience.

Vista was about making Wi-Fi connections as seamless, manageable and secure as wired networks.The next Windows version is really about taking Wireless networking to the next level by enabling new complete end to end scenarios and experiences that are going to change how windows PCs interact with each other and other devices and nodes over a wireless network.

As a part of the Windows Networking Ecosystem Technologies team, you will be working on scenarios around virtualizing Wireless to allow connections to multiple networks simultaneously. You will be working on enabling new windows to windows connectivity paths within a wireless network to improve wireless throughput and latency. You will be working on wireless-only office and mesh networking scenarios that will make setup and management of wireless networks quick and inexpensive with the goal to reduce TCO for centrally controlled and secured deployments by improving manageability, performance and reliability.

As a part of this work, you will be working closely on existing and in-works wireless standards such as IEEE 802.11s, 802.11k, 802.11r, 802.11w. This position will provide you the unique opportunity of working on core wireless areas as well as collaborating with several other key Windows technologies to deliver a complete functional end to end scenario. The work will be in both the Windows kernel and user space.

View Full Article: Long Zheng’s Blog

The kernel, which lacks Vista’s bells and whistles or even a graphics system at all, takes up just 25MB on disk as compared with 4GB that the full Windows Vista takes up. And while people would need far more than MinWin to run even a basic Web server, Traut said it shows that Windows, at its heart, does not have to be a monster resource hog.

View Full Article: CNET News.com

The third service pack for Windows XP and the first major refresh for Windows Vista, are not even out in final form, as Vista SP1 moved from pre-beta to fully fledged beta, followed by a preview of XP SP3, but the releases are already old news. In parallel with the development of Windows Server 2008, formerly codenamed Longhorn, Vista SP1 and XP SP3, Microsoft is also focusing on building Windows 7, formerly codenamed Vienna. Windows 7 is designed to be the successor of Windows Vista, and is currently planned for 2010. Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Eric Traut gave a presentation of the kernel of Windows 7, the operating system’s core, which is designed to have a minimal footprint.

MiniWin “is the core of Windows 7. It is a collection of components that we’ve taken out. A lot of people think of Windows as this really large, bloated operating system, that’s maybe a fair characterization, I could admit. It is large, it contains a lot of stuff in it, but at its core, the kernel and the components that make up the very core of the operating system, actually its pretty streamlined. It’s still bigger than I’d like it to be but we’ve taken a shot recently at really stripping out all of the layers above and making sure that we have a very clean architectural layer”, Traut revealed.

MiniWin is an internal only product. Microsoft plans in no way to productize MiniWin; however, the bare-bone kernel will act as the core for a lot of the company’s solutions. Traut gave a presentation of the Windows 7 source code base that occupies only 25 MG of disk space. The amount is virtually insignificant compared with the 4 GB that Windows Vista manages to take out. Of course that the MiniWin stripped down kernel is an integer part of Microsoft’s strategy to deliver a modular installation of its operating system, something already done with Windows Server 2008’s core installation. MiniWin is composed of approximately 100 files and it will run with just 40 MB of RAM. But at the same time it does not come with a graphics subsystem and only brings to the table a rudimentary HTTP server. You can access a video of Traut’s presentation of Windows 7, and MiniWin via this link.

Source: ctforumgroup

Recent reports have surfaced stating that Microsoft has moved at least some of the development of Windows 7 to its Microsoft India location.

Currently, most details available about Windows 7 stem from speculation. What we know right now is that the system will have multiple SKUs, be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit, feature subscription-based content, and (hopefully) be released around 2010. Other possible features include enhanced virtualization capabilities and more advanced network diagnostic tools.

According to Moneycontrol India, the plan to move some of Windows 7’s development offshore was announced by Jon DeVaan, the Senior Vice President of the Windows Core Operating System Division. The team from India is a mix of Windows and Windows Live developers, and it will be led by Sunil Bansali.

Just when your hands were full trying to figure out if and when your company should upgrade to Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, word got out last week that Microsoft is planning to release the next version of Windows, known as Windows 7, in 2010.

Most businesses are planning to roll out Vista in stages, a percentage of computers every year for the next few years. The timeframe for the new version of Windows raises the question: Should you bother to upgrade to Vista at all or would your company be better off jumping to 7 straight from Windows XP? Unfortunately, the Business Technology Blog doesn’t have the answer. But we can tell you that no one else does at this point either.

That’s not to say some pundits and publications aren’t trying. This article in PC World, for example, teases us with the headline “What Will Windows 7 Look Like?” and then quotes a bunch of people who say that they have no idea. Gartner recently put out an advisory, suggesting that companies would face challenges if they didn’t upgrade to Vista before upgrading to Windows 7, but the reason was that Vista was delayed so often that it is foolish to count on Windows 7 being released on time.

The Business Technology Blog tried unsuccessfully to get a Microsoft spokesperson to tell us everything there was to know about Windows 7. (The spokesperson clarified that while the conventional wisdom is that Windows 7 will be released in 2010, the company has never announced a target release date, and had no other comment.) But even if we had learned all the intended features, this blog would have taken the information with a huge grain of salt. Talking about an operating system and building one are two very different things. For example, Microsoft mentioned often that a new technology for storing data on a computer called “Win FS” was going to be one of the pillars of Vista. But it never materialized and Vista stores data the same way as earlier versions of Windows.