Microsoft: Vista follow-up likely in 2009

Anusha

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Jun 13, 2006
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Although the time gap between XP and Vista’s release dates was more than five years, Microsoft is claiming it will be different this time around. At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, representatives said the software giant is planning for the next client operating system by the end of 2009. Vista shipped about two-and-a-half years after XP SP2, and Vista's follow-up is expected to take about the same amount of time, according to Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division: "You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with. That's a good timeframe for refresh.”

Last year, Microsoft code named Vista’s successor as Vienna, but Fathi said he could not disclose the current name or what would be the major improvements in the release. "We've been told not to use it publicly. We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it. But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

News source: InfoWorld
 

chaminga_d

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Oct 26, 2006
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Vista is 50 million lines of code. If you know a way to make that in any reasonable timeframe profitably, let me know so i can patent the method and live off it.

I'm going to guess that windows' code bases are following some crazy progression for each major release. It has to be at least linear in my view, and could in fact be closer to quadratic (more stuff has to be done, and it has to interlink in more ways with other stuff, ad infinitum).

Best resource I can find is this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?ex=1301115600&en=d0c82ccf5d5122fb&ei=5090

Bung those figures into a graph and it becomes superlinear.

My point being that if this is a minor release, the next version of Windows will probably be something like 60-70 million lines of code. If it's a major release, that becomes something like 100 million if not more. Making that in 2 1/2 years doesn't seem feasible to me.