With Vista just about making it to the markets following a long delay, Microsoft Corp. is preparing to deliver a follow-up client by 2009, according to a Redmond executive at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
If the client is released by then, Redmond would have accomplished a faster turnaround time than Vista, which hit the markets five years after Windows XP was released. Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development at Windows Core Operating System Division in Microsoft said the reason Vista had been delayed was because it was exceptional.
"We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release."
He was referring to the fact that the 2003 worm attacks had caused Microsoft to focus all its energies on the XP Service Pack 2 release. Fathi said that Vista had shipped two-and-a-half years after XP SP2 so the same timeframe would be applicable to Vista's follow-up client.
It is rumored that Vista's follow-up is called Vienna, but Fathi said they were not supposed to talk about it. However he did elaborate on several new features in the follow-up, "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers."
