Reality check: what we know (and don't) about Windows 7

Dashken · Dec 21, 2007

Excited and whimsical speculation about future versions of Windows is a popular pastime, almost as much as complaining that newly-released versions are too different from the "old reliable" releases that everybody knows and (sometimes) loves. With Windows Vista recently celebrating its first birthday and preparing for the release of Service Pack 1, a team of developers at Microsoft is already busy working on its successor. While Microsoft has been pretty good about keeping the details of "Windows 7" under wraps, a few enthusiastic employees have leaked out a few details. As is usually the case in these situations, people have taken these tiny tidbits and added their own—often highly improbable—speculation. In this brief report, we'll review what we know, what we expect, and what we're calling bunk on, all based on our knowledge of Windows 7 from inside sources at Microsoft.

One thing we all know about Windows 7 is the management team that will be leading the project. Jim Allchin—the veteran who led the Windows XP and Vista teams—is gone, and in his place is Steven Sinofsky, who previously headed up the Office 2007 project. This has raised all sorts of speculation that the Windows user interface will be getting a similar sort of "face lift" as the venerable Office suite did in its last release. Some have even gone so far as to say it would be "Ribbon-based."

Windows 7 will get a facelift, but the extent of the UI changes are not yet known at Microsoft: current Windows 7 builds, which we have seen in person, use the Vista interface. Final designs for the UI have not yet been decided, and likely will not be for several months. If someone shows you any leaked screenshots of Windows 7, you can tell them that they have almost certainly been duped by enthusiastic fakers with a copy of Photoshop. Humans are visual creatures, and for most people the user interface is the only way to know that something has changed with a new release of the operating system. Unfortunately, the UI is typically the last thing to be finalized. Those of you who have watched the development of previous versions of Windows know that even once you start seeing concept UIs, nothing is set in stone.

With Windows 7, even the boot screen hasn't been designed yet. Currently, when Windows 7 boots, it displays a stylized "7" taking up most of the screen, drawn like an artist's quick sketch with thin lines using the Windows logo colors.
Don't throw away those Win32 apps just yet

Another common prediction is that Windows 7 will do away with backwards compatibility, and instead, run all previous Win32 applications in a built-in virtual machine. This rumor is false. The theme of "throwing it all away" and starting over with something fresh and new is a common desire in computer enthusiast circles. Typically, people will reference Apple's decision to virtualize the "Classic" Mac OS when the company released OS X, and assume that Microsoft is eager to do the same.

However, this argument completely ignores the reasons why Apple went the virtualization route in the first place: "Classic" applications were written to run on an OS with no memory protection and assumed that they could address any piece of memory they wanted. Such applications could only run in a virtual sandbox on a modern OS with full memory protection, such as Mac OS X.

Microsoft has no such limitation with Win32 applications, which ran natively on Windows NT ever since its first release in 1993. The Win32 subsystem has worked well ever since. Why would Microsoft throw away years of working, tested code to run Win32 apps in a VM sandbox, with all the attendant extra RAM requirements and barriers to inter-application communication?

We believe that Microsoft will be bundling the ability to run older applications in virtual machines if desired as part of the base Windows 7 product. Microsoft has been on this track for a while now: it released an older version of Virtual PC as a free download last year, and included a stripped-down version as part of Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise. Building a VM into Windows 7 will be the ultimate way of handling older applications that misbehave on modern versions of Windows. It will not be required, however.

The kernel gets smaller, but don't expect MinWin miracles

Some technology journalists who read about the "MinWin" demonstration immediately thought that the Windows 7 core would magically shrink to MinWin's specs of 25MB of disk and 40MB of RAM. Unfortunately, that excitement is a little misguided: MinWin is missing the entire graphical interface of Windows, as well as 90 percent of its functionality. Much of the bulk of Windows 7 will be due to the operating system supporting extra features that are not part of MinWin. However, the point of the exercise was to show that the Windows NT kernel continues to be developed and optimized.

Still, you can expect the trend of modularizing Windows to continue with Windows 7—Windows Server 2008 can already be run without the GUI, and this feature might eventually find itself in the consumer versions of Windows as well.
Multitouch? Multitouch.

The Internet was abuzz when a Microsoft employee in the Tablet PC division posted an excited message on his blog. Pulling no punches, he boasted that "if you are impressed by the "touch features" in the iPhone, you'll be blown away by what's coming in Windows 7."

Microsoft has been working on multitouch technology with its Surface technology, and parts of this technology are indeed coming to Tablet PCs and laptops—Microsoft Research's Steve Hodges demonstrated one possible way this transition could happen. Multitouch is definitely the future, and it looks like Windows 7 will be ready.

But when will Windows 7 be ready for the public? Microsoft isn't saying, but my source tells me it is farther along than most people think: most of the features have been locked down, and work is proceeding at a steady pace. Longhorn this isn't: Windows 7 is unlikely to fall into the tar pits of multiple, interlocking dependencies that plagued the Vista development team. Current estimates are for Windows 7 to appear in 2010, but it could arrive in late 2009 if all continues to go well.

Source: Reality check: what we know (and don't) about Windows 7
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