Ballmer Drops Hints About Windows 7, Cloud Computing
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer talked about the nascent Windows 7 operating system and the company's vision for syncing up applications in the Internet cloud at a Gartner-sponsored event Thursday.
However, Ballmer held back on much of the details. Microsoft is planning to release big news on those topics at its Professional Developers Conference, which is scheduled to take place on Oct. 27 in Los Angeles.
Vista Adoption and Windows 7
David Smith, Gartner's lead analyst on Web 2.0 and cloud computing, commented on Windows Vista's apparent slow adoption rate. For instance, after two years of product availability, Vista accounts for about 10 percent of large-enterprise integrations.
Ballmer denied that Vista's adoption rate has been slow. Vista has had a faster adoption rate than Windows XP after two years' time, on both the consumer and enterprise fronts, he said. Microsoft decided to enhance security in Vista at the expense of compatibility but adoption is ramping up now, he added.
Gartner, for its part, is predicting that Vista use will grow to 50 percent by 2010, according to Smith.
Ballmer commented on the question of skipping Vista for Windows 7, as some polls have suggested that many IT admins will try to do just that.
"We hope you'll deploy Vista and it'll make sense to you, but if not, we're all prepared for you to deploy Windows 7," Ballmer said, explaining that Windows 7 will be compatible with Vista.
Gartner predicts that the Windows 7 product will appear in the second half of 2009, contradicting Microsoft officials, who have pegged product release for early 2010.
Ballmer didn't disclose a product release date. However, a preproduction version of Windows 7 will be available to PDC attendees.
Neil MacDonald, Gartner's lead analyst on Microsoft, suggested that the PDC-released version will just be "a minor release." Ballmer disputed that term. Microsoft has already worked on Windows 7 for two and a half years, he said, so it'll be more than that.
"It's a release that I think will do a lot of what people want us to do on performance, cleanup," Ballmer said of the upcoming Windows 7 pre-beta. "In very nice ways on the UI, we are going to pioneer some of the things in terms of the way touch and multitouch is used in the user interface. We've improved what I would call the shell or the basic tools that people have to manage programs and information."