I don’t think so!
BillG made reference to a newer version this week at the IADB’s annual meeting. When asked about a new version of Windows he said “That’ll be sometime in the next year or so that we’ll have a new version.” He added: “I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways.”
I don’t think this is really a new version of Windows, more likely a Vista SP2 release that has a marketing programme associated with it or maybe he meant a beta would start in a year. I can’t see anyway it will not be Vista based. The pain of upgrading all our development from XP to Vista took a good 3 years from the first beta to release. There isnt enough time to develop, test and release a completely refreshed OS in that time, especially one with new features to be super excited about. There has been much talk of MinWin or components for Windows 7, again this is unlikely in any significant way as so much of the current OS is interlinked and cross dependent.
The W7M1 builds floating about now are just Vista with minor changes so far. Things would need to be a lot more advanced to have a release in a year.
But, could there be a secret project? I have long suggested to people in MS that a new parallel OS project should be started based on VM technology. This would be a highly secure mini-loader which could then load guest Windows OS partitions. These guest partitions could run specific applications or a new desktop. This would allow backward compatibility whilst allowing new desktop UI experience to be available. This would ease the migration to new types of application which are deployed separately to the UI experience. This is all possible because of Multicore and Hyper-V technology which permits this kind of segmentation. This will allow Microsoft to break free of the past architecture whilst retaining compatibility.
