According to a high-level Microsoft executive, Vista’s replacement, code named ”Vienna”, is already being developed, and could be on the shelves by 2009.

Speaking at a recent conference in San Francisco, the corporate vice president of development of Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division,Ben Fathi, said the company didn’t have the time to make all the significant improvements it wanted to include in Vista. 

The original plans for Vista included a reinvented user interface and yet another new file system. However, Microsoft was distracted by XP Service Pack 2 (XP SP2) due to all the vulnerabilities in the original version of Windows XP, and could not devote the engineering resources required to develop the new features.

“We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile. Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn’t deliver in one release,” Fathi told PC World.

While there was a five year period between the launches of Vista and Windows XP, Fathi pointed out that there was two-and-a-half years between XP SP2. He thought that was a “good time frame for (a) refresh”, which means we could expect to see the next version of the operating system in  2009.

When asked what the best new features in Vienna would be, Fathi said that it was really too early to say, but it could be hypervisors or a new “user interface paradigm”.

The takeaway from this is that Microsoft wanted Vista to be more than it is (funny, they don’t mention that in the PR or advertising), and that the Vista we should have had (if not for the security flaws in Windows XP) is probably two-and-a-half years away.

You may remember that Microsoft launched a compromised, short-lived, dog of an operating system, called Windows Me, in September 2000. It was replaced by Windows XP in October 2001.

While I wouldn’t suggest that Windows Vista is in the same league as Windows Me, I do start getting that sinking feeling when I hear about intended features that didn’t make it into Vista, and its relatively short intended life cycle.

Related:

Free start menu replacement for Vista

Free Windows+Tab/Alt+Tab replacement for Vista

Vista is not yet good as XP replacement, says Dutch Consumers’ Union

Google will pass profits of Microsoft Windows in 2009

Windows 7 on track for 2009 release

Entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 6:48 pm under Vista.  Print This Post

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