14 DAY TRIAL // Under the leadership of Steven "Don't Call Me Transparent" Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, Microsoft will no longer repeat the five year gap between Windows XP and Windows Vista, or the mistakes done with the latest Windows client. The first sign that the Windows 7 apple will drop fat from the Windows Vista tree is the fact that the next iteration of Windows, due at the end of 2009, will be tailored for the same hardware infrastructure as XP's successor.
Rather than being a re-write of Microsoft's proprietary operating system, Windows 7 will simply build on top of Windows Vista's graphics, audio, and storage subsystems. At the same time, the Vista kernel will evolve into Windows 7's core, as Sinofsky and Christopher Flores, Director Windows Communications denied that Microsoft is building a new kernel from the ground up. Windows 7 will indeed feature an advanced model of componentization and a new kernel architecture, but it will do it by straying only superficially from what Vista is today.
"While these changes will increase our engineering agility, they will not impact the user experience or reduce application or hardware compatibility. In fact, one of our design goals for Windows 7 is that it will run on the recommended hardware we specified for Windows Vista and that the applications and devices that work with Windows Vista will be compatible with Windows 7," Flores stated.
In the context in which Microsoft promises that the software and hardware solutions designed for Windows Vista will continue to play well with Windows 7, users should expect all details such as the UAC, the kernel, driver integration etc. to largely stay in place. Windows 7 running on the same hardware as Vista is a move that will not stick the resource hog label on the next version of Windows. Microsoft will effectively enjoy a two year buffer in which the hardware ecosystem will grow while Windows will effectively stay in place.
This means that Windows 7, planned for the end of 2009 according to Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, will be designed to run on hardware from 2007. This means that a computer with a 1-GHz 32-, or 64-bit (x64) processor, 1 GB of system memory, at least a DirectX 10 graphics card, if not even DirectX 9, with over 128MB of graphics memory, and a 40 GB hard drive will be more than enough to power Windows 7.
At the Windows Digital Lifestyle Consortium in Tokyo, Japan, at the start of May, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates pointed that the Redmond company was actually hinting that Windows 7 would not only be more energy efficient, but also that it would use less resources, especially RAM. Now, Flores claims that Windows 7 will at least match Vista in terms of hardware requirements. One thing is clear, while it let Vista swallow all the hardware resources it could, Microsoft seems keen on keeping Windows 7 on a diet.