Yesterday Chris Flores, a director at Microsoft for the Windows Client Communications Team, wrote at length about what’s going on with Windows 7.

A few things were brought to light about how Microsoft does things concerning the Windows operating system, such as:

The six dimensions of quality

• Device compatibility
• Application compatibility
• Reliability
• Performance
• Battery life
• Security

All of the above cover just about everything concerning a desktop computer or laptop. You’ll notice that these six items are not called tiers because that would denote importance of one over the other. The terminology is applied to state “all this stuff counts.”

Questions answered

Is Windows 7 going to be a major release? Yes. Not “maybe,” not “this will be an add-on .” Flat out yes, it will be a major release.

Will Windows 7 be using a new kernel? No. It will continue to use the same kernel architecture used in Vista. Some may think this sounds bad but it’s actually good because it means anything designed for Vista will run on 7 and won’t require a workaround.

A “solid foundation”?

The only thing Chris said that really made me say “Um.. excuse me?” was:

Windows Vista established a very solid foundation.. ..on subsystems such as graphics, audio and storage.

This says to me “The guts of the OS are great, but everything else was.. unfinished.”

When Windows 7 arrives it will actually be finished this time around when it becomes generally available.

This is not to say Vista doesn’t work. It does work. But for many it just doesn’t work well.

Showing progress

According to the article, the Windows team is on schedule concerning the OS development. This is a whole lot better than before where Microsoft kept delaying Vista over and over again.

Microsoft appears to be committed to releasing major releases of the Windows operating system sooner than later to keep up with the pace of future technologies.

But we’ll see what happens when release time is near. We’ll be watching.

[Source: Windows Vista Team Blog]