Windows 7

As you might have heard, Microsoft announced last week that the next version of Windows is going to be called “Windows 7″. Unfortunately, most of what I know about Windows 7 is under a non disclosure agreement with Microsoft, but I wanted to at least answer two of the questions that I keep being asked.

For starters, there seems to be a lot of confusion over the name since there have been way more than seven Windows releases already. From what I have been told, Microsoft limped all of the Windows 9.x releases and Windows ME in together, and considers them Windows 4 (at least for naming purposes). Windows 2000 was Windows 5.0, but Microsoft considers Windows XP to be Windows 5.1. Windows Server 2003 is classified as Windows 5.2, and WIndows Vista / Windows Server 2008 are classified as Windows 6.0.

Does that make sense to you? Me neither, but oh well.

 The other question that I want to answer is regarding Windows 7′s purpose. There seems to be a lot of speculation on the Internet that Windows 7 is going to be WIndows Vista SP2, disguised as a new release. I can tell you with certainty that this is not the case. Microsoft is currently working on Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista although I can not disclose any specific details at this time. Once the embargo has been lifted, I will talk about what the service pack accomplishes in this blog.