Things to Remember

Microsoft Windows 7: What the Future Holds

Design Goals

Microsoft plans a completely new GUI for versions of Windows 7 running on the kind of high-powered computers that now run Vista. The same team that designed Office 2007 is in charge of this interface, and it's likely we'll see something like the Office 2007 Ribbon in place of Windows' traditional menus and toolbars. Unlike the Office Ribbon, however, the new UI—whatever it finally looks like—will be something you can turn on or off, so corporate users can maintain the same interface they've been using for years, without expensive retraining.

Many clues to what the Windows 7 development team is thinking about can be found in the Windows Feedback Button found in the early builds. This Feedback tool invites developers to comment on the five "pillars" on which Windows 7 will be built. Each is divided into a number of scenarios that have only brief and vague descriptions. Here's a quick description of the pillars, with some guesses at what the associated scenarios might portend for Windows 7. The fullest analysis we've seen of these pillars is a long posting by "Bryant" at AeroXperience (www.aeroxp.org).

The first pillar is "Specialized for Laptops." Scenarios associated with it include data security, speed, wireless improvements, synchronization, and power management. One scenario is called "Touch and Tablet Usability," which may have something to do with the rumors that Microsoft, having been stung by the touch-screen keyboard in Apple's iPhone, is planning something even better for Windows. Indeed, Microsoft recently announced plans to integrate multi-touch technology in Windows 7, making user input possible by touching and gesturing your fingertip around the screen—a way of one-upping the iPhone interface while covering your monitor with greasy fingerprints.

The second pillar is "Designed for Services." This includes the Live Mesh–type experience that I described earlier, plus promised improvements to system upgrades from Vista to Windows 7—the kind of upgrade that has never been a Windows strong point. This category also includes "The Family Friendly Web Experience," which presumably means some form of site filtering, perhaps integrated into Live Mesh.

The third pillar is "Personalized Computing for Everyone," a category that includes customizable desktops and a vaguely defined scenario in which the desktop can link to local culture—presumably meaning that the desktop will make use of local music and images. This pillar also includes the ability to access your files from anywhere (as in Apple's Back to My Mac feature), and secure roaming, apparently a scheme to let you access your bookmarks and passwords from anywhere—a convenience that also sounds like a potential security nightmare.

"Optimized for Entertainment," the fourth pillar, promises home-media streaming, better high-DPI graphics than in Vista, and a new version of Windows Media Center codenamed "Fiji," already in a late stage of development. Fiji will be built into Vista-based Media Center PCs later this year, but an improved version will clearly go into Windows 7. New Fiji features include QAM support (so digital cable TV signals can flow into a PC without a set-top box) plus support for DirectTV tuners and better guides to available HD programming.

The fifth and last pillar is "Engineered for Ease of Ownership," which includes improved installation time (10 minutes is one figure being bandied about), and lots of promises about "just works" functionality and similar conveniences that Microsoft has been promising, not very convincingly, since the Windows 95 era.