Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer took the stage at the All Things Digital conference yesterday to show off Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista. Although the demo was short, there were two significant new features — system-wide multitouch and a floating, pie-shaped taskbar menu.
The multitouch support is hardly a surprise given Microsoft’s Surface demos — which feature a multitouch interface — and the success of the iPhone. Naturally any multitouch device is going to be compared to the iPhone and indeed the Windows 7 interface has all the same tricks, right down to the “throwing” gestures to flip through documents Cover Flow-style.
Far more interesting is the re-imagined taskbar, which now floats about as a pie shaped menu, making it theoretically easier to access and use. Rather than heading down to the bottom left corner of your screen, the new taskbar appears to pop up wherever your cursor (or finger) happens to be.
The design of the pie-shaped task bar bears something of a resemblance to the alternate Radial Menu interface for the popular Mac app Quicksilver (video). However, taking the Quicksilver idea and combining it with the multitouch interface could make it significantly more useful.
Nice though the multitouch and additional eye candy may be, judging by the comments on an earlier post over at Gadget Lab, Microsoft could be seriously misjudging what customers want in a new OS — namely speed and stability.
One commenter neatly summarizes a common theme: “I just want a simple, fast booting OS, that supports all the hardware and applications that I am running.”
Perhaps we’ve reached the point were Microsoft (and Apple as well) have run out of ways to “improve” the desktop and ought to concentrate on creating a simple, stable background on which to run the applications we actually use.
It may not sound all that sexy and exciting, but it may be that we’ve reached a point in our relationship with operating systems where stability, speed and reliability trump a flashy new outfit.
To that end many were hoping that Microsoft might pull an Apple and completely rebuild the OS kernel for Windows 7, but that won’t be happening.
A post on the Windows Vista blog says, “contrary to some speculation, Microsoft is not creating a new kernel for Windows 7.” Instead the company plans to refine “the kernel architecture and componentization model introduced in Windows Vista.”
In other words, Windows 7 will be Vista’s successor, not a completely new system rewrite.
On the bright side, Microsoft says one of its goals for Windows 7 is to ensure that the minimum hardware requirements stay the same as they were for Vista. There’s no telling whether or not the company will stick to that goal, but if it does perhaps Windows 7 can avoid some of the backlash Vista has experienced.
While yesterday’s demo provided a quick glimpse of Windows 7 don’t look for Microsoft to start trotting out feature lists. After touting Vista’s extensive features and slowly scaling them back one by one, Microsoft seems to be feeling a bit wary about over-promising for Windows 7.
Microsoft has yet to set a date for Windows 7, but if it sticks to its vague schedule it should arrive roughly two years from now.
Oh and those screenshots Crunchgear showed off yesterday from a “reliable” source? A Microsoft spokesperson tells CNet’s Dan Farber that the images are either “very old or fake.”
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