Windows 7, the successor of Windows Vista and the next iteration of Windows is here. Forget about Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3, Microsoft has currently began serving an early development milestone of its next Windows operating system to partners. Before Steven Sinofsky, having moved from leading the building of the Office System, and currently the Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, took the helm of the Windows development project from Jim Allchin, former Co-President, Platforms & Services Division, the successor of Windows Vista was referred to internally with the codename Windows Vienna.

This aspect has changed under Sinofsky, and Microsoft is currently hard at work developing Windows 7. the number illustrates a strategy to label products in development by their product number rather than a codename. And since Windows Vista was the sixth Windows operating system to come out of Redmond...

Although Microsoft has yet to serve the final bits for Vista SP1 and XP SP3, key partners of the company have already received the "Milestone 1" (M1) of Windows 7 for code validation purposes, sources indicated to TG Daily. These first Windows 7 bits are nothing more than a very early development milestone of the next version of Windows. At this point in time, Windows 7 M1 is in alpha stage.

Windows 7 M1 has shipped in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but only in English. The alpha build of Windows 7 also comes with a new edition of Windows Media Center, no word yet if the release is in any way connected with Windows Fiji. As Vista brought to the table the first integrated version of Windows Media Center, Windows Fiji was planned as the next version of WMC but as a standalone product. In addition, Windows 7 M1 also features the ability of joggling with multiple graphics cards from different manufacturers simultaneously. In this manner Microsoft is introducing support for interoperable heterogeneous graphics system.

While Windows 7 M1 has already been made available for testing to a selected group of Microsoft partners, the second milestone of the next Windows version is planned at this point in time for April/May 2008, with M3 supposedly dropping in the third quarter of this year. The Beta and Release Candidate dates have not been determined so far. Still, the first beta of Windows 7 could be made available in early 2008, with the release to manufacturing date moved from 2010 to 2009. Microsoft has so far failed to offer official confirmation of Windows 7 M1.