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Whats the deal here? i dont follow the PC world, but apparently Vista is version 6.0 and they just announced Windows 7.0 ?!?! thats a heck of a lot of wasted marketing and dev. $$$ if you ask me, cause Vista has barely been on the market for 2 years. right ?

So whats the 'deal' with 7 ? is it a jump similar to Win95 to Win98 ?

If you ask me, they just killed Vista.

Hold you horses.

If they announced Windows 7 now, that doesn't mean it will be REALLY available before 2012.

How long was it between Vista announced and shipped ?

-t

No worse than Apple releasing Tiger in April 2005, then at WWDC in 2006, announcing plans for Leopard which, accoring to a search on MacNN, was supposed to be released by the end of 2006.

Comparing OS X and Windows OS-cycles with such a narrow view is ridiculous. Apple has a lot work to do to stay ahead and it's no automatism in place to ensure this, but regarding (the OS itself and) OS release cycles, it's way ahead.

His point was that the probablility of Vista sales being killed by the announcement of Windows 7 is as great as the probability that Tiger sales were killed by the announcement of Leopard. In other words, announcing Windows 7 early is not gonna kill Vista sales, just as announcing Leopard early did not kill Tiger sales.

Also, Vista sales are already in the toilet, so they might as well announce that they're actually going to *release* some of the worthwhile functionality initially slated for Longhorn before it became the castrated XP-plus-some that Vista is now.

Could it be Windows 7 = Vista + improvement? Possibly, they just want to change the name.

For me, I'm the only one who use Vista business at work. WindowsXP is just *old* to me.

Windows 7 hasn't really been announced... some of the kernel devs have shown off the new kernel at a few geek meetings and Gates mentioned that the external (MSDN) betas will start next year.

They'll probably get back to the 2-3 year pre-Vista cycle (95->98->2000->2002(XP) rather than the 5 year cycle for Vista, so late 2009-late 2010 is the expected release timeframe. Many of Vista's problems were driven by management and the head of the Windows group was just replaced with the head of the Office group (who lead Office 2007, which is fantastic, not like the poop 2008 is), so I'm expecting more out of Windows 7.

Hopefully I'll be able to get in the Windows 7 beta (I was in Vista beta, and that experience lead me to stick with XP!) and see how it is.

Exactly, thank you for understanding my point.

Everyone who’s bought a copy of Vista is in the Vista Beta testing group.

No more than any other .0 OS reslease; at least I didn't pay for it.

And how is this different then Apple announcing a new version of OSX? Just because vista is out the door that they'd stop developing the next version of the OS.

From what I read, microsoft is trying to have an aggressive deadline for this version, but their track record is rather poor. I've not read any details about what the potential features could be, but if they fall into the similar trap of over promising things it will end up like vista. A bloated hog that's little different then windows xp, except for the ripped off OSX gui that is.

Well Apple's OSX releases are admittedly evolutionary, incremental and cheaper(for a single package). With Windows, theyre bloated, pretty different from the ground up from the previous version and far more expensive.... not to mention the 6(?) different versions.

With OSX, Apple is exploiting the foundation laid back in 10.0, with Windows it's different APIs, filesystems, etc.... Oh and a lot more expensive. Seeing as how their major consumer base is the enterprise, i dont see seee how releasing different platforms so close to each other is good for business. imho.

Uh ... I'm sorry, but there's no other way to put this: Get your head out of your butt.

I would say that they are simply upgrading Vista... and trying to get it on a more Mac like upgrade cycle. Apple's been able to cover so much ground using their current method.

Also, comparing Mac users to Windows users is foolish on many levels. I would argue that the XP to Vista upgrade offered few tantalizing reasons for end users to upgrade.

Windows 7 is supposed to be the OS X of Windows. It's a ground-up rewrite of the NT kernel and is not binary compatible with NT 6. They'll be doing a Classic style implementation through Virtual PC for NT 6 & FAT binaries, and a Carbon style API for future Windows applications.

Who knows, it could be good. Microsoft doesn't have a great track record, though. Guess we'll see.

I thought that's what Win2K was.

What, you're gonna get all persnickety whenever Microsoft decides to "OS X" its way out of a bad situation?

I thought they rewrote the NT kernel in Vista?