News - Microsoft wants 'thought leader' to execute Windows 8 by July 2010

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A job posting for the firm reveals Microsoft is looking to start work on the next version of its operating system by the next half of next year.

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Read more.

Only starting work by mid 2010? What on earth are the team doing in the meantime?

working on it, just not focusing on it i would have thought - odd article

Yeah very odd - they've been working on it for some time now!

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Only starting work by mid 2010? What on earth are the team doing in the meantime?

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Fixing bugs, working on new features that will eventually roll or evolve into Windows 8, and helping push out other projects.

PK

Yeah I would say that there is a core "Windows" team that is always working on the "next" version, but more in a technology overview kind of way.

So everyone works on W7, once done, some go to join this core team to start fleshing out ideas for the "next" version, the rest concentrate on bugs enhancements for W7. After the first service pack the majority of the other will join the "next" team, leaving a small number to continue sorting any problems left in W7. Probably the same guys that are still working on Vista updates too.

My guess is for a Service Pack for W7 around mid 2010 as well :)

Microsoft actually have lots of teams, all working on different parts of the OS - they merge their work into a main build. They also fork builds into different streams - e.g. for beta releases or even the RTM build. Theres a few interesting articles on their development process and how they manage such a huge project. The mind boggles.

Yup, just like any other large software project. Obviously the above post was a vast over simplification, I've read some of the articles about the dev teams in MS before. They make a good read :)

I thought Microsoft were abandoning the big release type thing, I thought it was all going to be incremental. With the amount of security fixes and patches they release, surely a subscription model is the way to go, funding constant improvements to the windows platform, but no big hectic releases every 3-5 years that require reinstalls etc. I'm not really sure what the ideal price would be, assuming I pay £60 every 3 years for a new Windows, £20 per year would correlate and you get free upgrades forever.

Things like a new GUI could be released as a Windows feature, similar to the way you can turn Aero on or off. I'm not explaining it very well but basically just that all updates were gradual and incremental rather than needing a ground-up approach.

Just my 2c

Eesh, no, the last thing you want is to have incremental updates and have thousands of configurations to manage.

It takes ages to roll out a new OS - most companies run on an absolute minimum refresh of three years. There are still plenty of large companies running NT, 95 or even worse (Ideally they shouldn't but they do)

This is also the reason why IE 6 refuses to die.

PK

Add the fact that even top level changes to the UI mean big architectural changes underneath to support it - it'd just be way, way worse than what we have now.

I thought MS were going to focus more on cloud computing after Win 7? Apparently not!