Lord of the Web

Windows 7, the successor to Vista and currently in develpment was demoed at the D6 digital conference. The big feature—in fact, the sole feature—demonstrated was multitouch, the same technology as found in Microsoft’s multi-thousand-dollar Surface table and Apple’s iPhone.

Whereas Windows Vista had a huge amount of public build-up, Microsoft has so far kept pretty quiet about Seven. Details about Vista were talked about in public seemingly non-stop from about 2003 until its eventual release in late 2006. As is now well-known, Vista didn’t deliver all of the features promised during its extended development, and the widespread negative perception of the OS has undoubtedly hurt both the Microsoft and Windows brands. The tack being taken with Seven is very different. Microsoft is deliberately keeping quiet about Windows 7 to attempt to ensure that the company can actually ship everything it promises in late 2009/early 2010.

Windows 7 is shaping up to be a far-less-ambitious release than Vista. Although the Vista plans were watered down from the Longhorn ideals, it nevertheless saw significant under-the-hood development, with the most significant part of this being an all-new graphics subsystem. These changes were very disruptive as they required all-new drivers for video, sound, and other core functionality, and this has contributed significantly to Vista’s reputation for poor compatibility when compared with its predecessor. This might not be such a problem were it for the fact that Vista fails to make any significant use of these new features. Plenty of pain—no real gain. To remedy this, Windows 7 is being pushed as a release that will consolidate on the ground-work laid by Vista. Windows 7 will not introduce any radical overhaul of core operating system subsystems; instead, it will leverage the new features introduced as part of the Vista release.

Here’s the latest video demonstrating Windows 7’s multitouch features: