Windows 8 Planning and Preparation in Progress

Following the five year gap between Windows XP and Windows Vista, Microsoft indicated that it would pick up the pace for the delivery of Windows Next releases, and Windows 7 was an illustrative example in this regard. The latest iteration of Windows was delivered within three years after the general availability of Vista, and it looks like Windows 8 will have a similar GA timeframe in regards to Windows 7, considering that planning and preparation for the next iteration of the Windows client is already in progress.

In a Microsoft job post for Software Development Engineer (via ActiveWin), a representative of the Redmond company mentions that the Windows project is “pushing forth on Windows 8 planning and preparation.” Now, in all fairness, this is nothing new. The software giant revealed even ahead of Windows 7 RTM that it had debuted planning for Windows 8. But the fact that planning and preparation for Windows 8 is still underway means that Microsoft hasn’t began work on the actual development process of Windows 7’s successor.

“This is a great time to join us. Our team owns the Windows Update Client and our code delivers software and updates to over 600 million computers. We just finished up work on Windows 7, and are pushing forth on Windows 8 planning and preparation. There are opportunities to work on a number of hard problems, including third-party application updating, updating virtual machines while they’re turned off (turns out this is pretty hard!), and delivering full applications, among others. To help us charge full steam on these fronts, we are looking for skilled and passionate software engineers,” reads an excerpt from the job post.

At the time of this article, Microsoft has taken down the job post, indicating that it is no longer available. We’re unsure whether this is because the role has been filled or because it was offering information about Widows 8 that wasn’t really meant for the public.

“As part of this team, you will help shape Windows 8. Components of our code include a core agent that runs as an NT service, an API layer and a UI application. We talk to the update servers using web services and we have special protocols in place to deal with the massive scale of the system,” the job ad notes.