The Wall Street Journal-20080206-Make Your Wish List- Microsoft Is Starting To Work on Windows 7
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Make Your Wish List; Microsoft Is Starting To Work on Windows 7
Full Text (881 words)Windows 7: Have you caught the fever yet?
It isn't as though Microsoft doesn't already have a lot on its mind, given last week's Yahoo announcement and the industry chess moves that followed. But other big wheels are also starting to turn in Redmond: Work is under way on the next version of Windows.
Mind you, it's not an upgrade to Vista, which came out last year and which next month will get a refresher in the form of Service Pack 1. (Similarly, Windows XP will soon have its Service Pack 3.) Windows 7 is a completely new version of the operating system, a version that doesn't yet even have an official name.
With the rumor mill beginning to turn, Microsoft will confirm only that work on Windows 7 has indeed begun and that it will take about three years to finish -- and that the software won't ship until it is ready to use.
The mere existence of a Windows 7 is something of a surprise, as some pundits said that Vista would be the last big release from Redmond. The Web, they reasoned, would take over the role of the operating system, a job we now know it isn't even close to being ready for.
Microsoft will have a lot to prove with a new Windows, considering the perception of Vista as being such a stumble. And even if it gets a well-received product out on time, the company will have to give customers a reason to upgrade. An additional hurdle for Vista, besides whatever shortcomings it may have had, was that many users didn't think they needed it, considering Microsoft had dealt with the more egregious security shortcomings of XP with its Service Pack 2.
Many computer owners equate the user interface -- the look of the windows and the desktop -- with the entire operating system. But operating systems do vastly more, even though handling peripherals or keeping track of files doesn't have the same eye-candy appeal as the interface.
Those deep-down features of Windows 7 will be shaped, in part, by Microsoft's business needs. While less-noticed than its battle with Google, for example, Microsoft also is in a tussle with VMware over virtualization, a technology that lets companies save on equipment by having one computer run many instances of an operating system. Virtualization is extremely popular with businesses, so it is expected that Microsoft will bake support for the feature deep into Windows 7.
In addition, Microsoft's engineers will be doing the same as engineers for all the big operating systems being shipped, including those for the Mac, Linux and Sun: Trying to make as many advances as possible in performance, reliability, security and the rest, while retaining compatibility with the untold millions of machines with earlier versions.
For possible new directions, they can look to big university computer-science departments, most of which have an operating-system research project or two under way, testing out new ideas. Stanford's David Mazieres, for instance, is advising research that tries to rethink the technical question of how much of its own software an operating system should "trust." We might have more-secure machines, he says, if it trusted itself less.
At Cornell, Ken Birman and his students are experimenting with the idea of building into the operating system a way to make it easier for end-users to write their own programs for sharing information.
Microsoft's research labs have an experimental OS of their own -- Singularity.
The best-known such research was housed at Bell Labs during the 1990s. It was called "Plan 9" after the campy movie. The idea behind Plan 9 was to build in more operating-system support for networking than was deemed necessary in Unix, which itself began as a Bell Labs research project a generation earlier.
Wim Sweldens, who ran Bell Labs' computer-sciences research center, said that while Plan 9 is no longer an active project, some of its ideas have been absorbed into today's operating systems, though not always as completely as its engineers might have hoped.
Some of the features of the new Windows may well involve unfilled promises, such as the new file system Microsoft had to yank from Vista because its development was behind schedule.
A file system is one of those prosaic bits of software plumbing that users take for granted. It's the file system's job to keep track of all your information, and an advanced file system can do this in a way that makes life much easier. Sun's ZFS file system, for example, makes it trivial for users to add extra storage hardware and has advanced data security and even data-compression features built right in. Apple is building its own operating systems so ZFS can run on them, making for a competitive situation that Microsoft eventually must face.
Many readers will have their own ideas about what Microsoft should do in Windows 7. "Make it more like a Mac" will probably lead the list. I have a wish of my own, having recently bought an H-P laptop that took 25 minutes after first being turned on to be ready for use, owing to both Microsoft and H-P larding on more software. My recommendation for Windows 7 is: "Show more respect for the value of my time."
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