Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates are taking the stage at this week’s Wall Street Journal D: All Things Digital (#6) conference. Rumor is Windows 7 will also be making its first public debut at the conference. I haven’t been able to confirm if Windows 7 really will be shown at the conference or not, but either way, Bill Gates is showing he’s a still a standup guy by taking much of the Vista-bashing heat. Gates has been the spokesperson for Windows 7 to date, relieving Ray Ozzie of making up for the past sins of Vista and Microsoft’s design by committee operating system efforts.
For an operating system that has little info available about it, I’m amazed at the quantity of articles and blog posts I come across about Windows 7. Most think it’s another ground up operating system rewrite, but I don’t see that happening. The only way Microsoft’s going to shave 3-4 years off the 7 year operating system upgrade cycle is to slim down the amount of features and software developed, build it the just completed Vista and Windows Server 2008 code base, or both. I would expect to see the beginnings of application virtualization in Windows 7, such as that provided via the acquisition of SoftGrid but I don’t see Microsoft dumping the entire Vista code base and beginning anew for the reasons I’ve stated.
More likely, Windows 7 will be a reconstituted Vista OS, removing a lot of the bloat needed to support heavy applications. Windows 7 needs to begin isolating applications from the operating system through an application virtualization layer. Think what Windows would be like if every application didn’t muck with the registry, leaving behind telltale entries and changes that can create havoc on other applications. The same is true for application DLLs which can cause incompatibilities, at best, and an unstable Windows OS, which happens more frequently than most of us wish.
Will we see Windows 7, and if so, what will we see. Well, it’s likely to visually look a lot like Vista’s look-and-feel. The “modularization” talked about I think will be the underpinnings of application virtualization though we may not hear those words as to minimize expectations at this point. I hope we do get a look.
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