Windows 7 Gets Its Coming-Out Party Windows 7 Release Plans and Reactions to the News Andy Patrizio
Another change that drew audience applause is being able to natively create and mount a virtual hard drive in Windows 7, a feature demonstrated on-stage. These drives can be either dynamic or fixed in size.
Sinofsky also teased a much smaller footprint for Windows 7.
He showed off a netbook with 1GB of memory and said that after it booted Windows, the tiny, low-powered notebook PC still had more than half of its memory left over.
Concerns over memory had proved to be another thorn in the side of Vista, with the older Windows XP finding new life not only among customers who didn't want Vista, but also as the OS of choice for less-powerful computers like netbooks.
It wasn't all about rethinking some of Vista's shortcomings. Sinofsky made one direct plea to the audience, for more 64-bit development — echoing predictions Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds made last week to InternetNews.com.
"Please develop for 64-bit. We think a lot of people will move to 64-bit and we need to you bring your code up as well," Sinofsky told the audience.
Release Plans
Sinofsky said Microsoft would release a broadly available public beta of Windows 7 early next year, which would be available for download from MSDN.
Beyond that beta, Sinofsky stuck to the company's stated release schedule, stating that Microsoft plans to make it available three years from the general availability of Vista — which would make it early 2010. InternetNews.com has learned that Microsoft has a much shorter time frame in mind and is aiming for a June 2009 release.
At the event, Microsoft gave out copies of Windows 7 Ultimate in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, plus Windows Server 2008 R2, which is also in beta.
Sizing Up Windows 7's Big Debut
Despite how much Microsoft has riding on Windows 7 in repairing the damage from Vista, not everyone at the presentation felt like the company was indeed making its most important sales pitch in years.
One reason may be that Microsoft simply doesn't rev up the fervor the way Steve Jobs does with the Apple faithful, some observers said.
"Part of the problem with Windows 7 is there are many changes," Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies told InternetNews.com. "Some of them small, some of them large, and it's hard to tell which are the good and package all that up in a short speech, and say, 'Here it is.'"
One change not discussed during the demo is the boot process. Prior versions of Windows have loaded components sequentially, but Windows 7 will load components in parallel. Boot time could be as fast as 15 seconds, in theory.
But Kay, who got a six-hour briefing on Windows 7 on Sunday, said he thought the operating system's first public unveiling had enough moments of applause for it to be considered successful.
"You're not going to get the kind of cheering you're going to get out of an Apple audience," he said. But they saw the outlines of what they're getting to work with, and they are leaving with the code."
In addition to showing off Windows 7, Microsoft on Tuesday also demonstrated .NET Framework 4.0, with new features for developers that include parallel programming support.
The company also took the wraps off Office Web apps — lightweight versions of its main Office applications that will run in any Web browser.
