Windows Vista is par excellence a product associated with countless delays, and still in a sense bearing the great sin of succeeding Windows XP after a five-year gap. In this context, there are those that are still to forgive Microsoft for the half of decade they had to wait for a new operating system. This is why, even before Windows Vista hit the shelves, in fact, even before the operating system had RTMed in 2006, Microsoft officials made it clear that the company would not repeat the five-year period with future releases of the Windows platform.

While delays did indeed plague Windows Vista, the phenomenon seems to be generalizing to other platforms. In fact, Apple has announced earlier this year that the future version of the Mac OS X operating system will be postponed until October 2007 due to the high development effort that has gone into building the iPhone.

Microsoft is, in turn, also working on the upcoming versions of the Windows client and server operating systems. Windows server 2008 is scheduled to be released to manufacturing by the end of 2007 which points to a possible 2007/early 2008 release. However, Microsoft is mute when it comes to the next version of Windows. The Redmond Company is focusing entirely on Windows Vista, has established a general Windows Omerta, and is not breathing a single word about Windows Seven.

"The launch of Windows Vista was an incredibly exciting moment for our customers and partners around the world, and the company is focused on the value Windows Vista will bring to people today. We are not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows, other than that we're working on it. When we are ready, we will provide updates," stated Kevin Kutz, Director, Windows Client back in February, after the launch of Windows Vista.

But not offering any details related to the version of Windows designed to replace Vista does take its toll on the company's plans. For example, Microsoft has announced a delay of the Professional Developer Conference scheduled for the fall of 2007, simply because it is not ready to discuss Windows Seven.

"We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall's Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed "Katmai," Visual Studio codenamed "Orcas" and Silverlight will already be in developers' hands and approaching launch, which is where we'll focus our developer engagement in the near term," reads an official Microsoft message posted on the PDC07 web page.