While people have been very critical of Window’s Vista, Microsoft is hoping to ‘come clean’ with the release of their next operating system – Windows 7.
By Elizabeth Montalbano
October 28, 2008 (IDG News Service) Microsoft Corp. today for the first time publicly demonstrated Windows 7, the next major release of its PC operating system, and the software maker insisted that Windows 7 will reflect lessons learned from the widely panned Windows Vista.
Microsoft also laid out a road map for the release of Windows 7 and handed out a pre-beta version to developers at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC), where it also demonstrated new features.
The first public beta of the operating system will be available early next year; it will be followed by test releases and release candidates that incorporate feedback from users of the public beta, said Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s senior vice president of Windows and Windows Live, in a keynote address.
Windows 7 is still targeted for release three years after Vista, he added. This would put its business release in late 2009 and general availability at the end of January 2010 if the operating system remains on schedule.
In his speech, Sinofsky said Microsoft is learning its lessons from Vista, which was widely criticized by users and the press, and spoofed famously in television advertisements by Apple Inc.
Sinofsky acknowledged that some of the criticism was deserved, particularly around Microsoft’s failure to adequately prepare its hardware, software and peripheral partners for Vista’s release, even though it was more than five years in the making.
Early Vista users experienced incompatibility with applications and found that devices and peripherals would not work with the operating system because drivers weren’t available.
Microsoft won’t repeat this mistake with Windows 7, Sinofsky said, and because the operating system kernel is the same as the one in Vista and Windows Server 2008, all of the devices and applications that work with those operating systems should also run on Windows 7.
“All of this device and compatibility work will pay off in Windows 7,” Sinofsky said.
Microsoft also will tweak the User Account Control feature (UAC), which was new in Vista, so it will be less of an inconvenience and work more efficiently, Sinofsky said.
UAC prevents users without administrative privileges from making unauthorized changes to a PC. But because of how it was set up in Vista, it can prevent even authorized users from accessing applications and features they should be able to use.
UAC did this through pop-up windows, which also were spoofed by Apple in television ads after Vista users reported that they appeared extremely frequently, even when users were performing authorized tasks.
Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft “went a little too far with UAC,” but as a result the Windows client operating system is now more secure. In Windows 7, Microsoft will focus on the security aspects of UAC but will ensure users won’t find it to be an invasive feature, he said.
During the keynote, Microsoft showed some new features in Windows 7, including a streamlined view of all the files and folders contained not only on a user’s PC, but also any other PCs on networks that he is allowed to access.
This feature is called Libraries, and it will improve desktop search in Windows 7 by allowing users to search more comprehensively across PC folders than ever before, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft also changed its Gadgets feature, another Vista addition. Gadgets are mini-applications that give users quick access to information, such as stock prices or weather reports, via icons. In Vista, gadget icons were confined to a task bar; with Windows 7, users will be able to move them around the desktop.
Perhaps the sexiest new Windows 7 feature demonstrated was the touch-screen interface, which lets people use their fingertips and small hand gestures to control applications.
Microsoft demonstrated how touch-screen controls can replace the mouse for actions such as opening the task bar and choosing a Windows Explorer window. If a user opens a folder with photos in it, he could, for example, scroll through those photos using his fingers and drag a photo into a Windows Paint application window and draw directly on the photo.
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