14 DAY TRIAL // With Windows 7 in the baking oven, Microsoft is looking past its traditional roots on the desktop to the Internet. In this context, the Redmond company is not only gearing up to release the pre-Beta bits of Windows 7 at the end of October, but also the first Beta of a new Windows operating system. In October 27-30, 2008, at the PDC2008 Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the pre-Beta build of Windows 7 will take Windows Vista's successor past the Milestone development phases, accompanying a new operating system referred to with the label Windows Cloud.
Microsoft itself is not in short supply of potential Windows killers, and during his latest European tour, the company's Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer revealed that the Redmond giant is cooking yet another alternative to its flagship operating system in addition to research and incubation platforms Singularity and Midori.
“When we talk about software plus services at Microsoft, we think it means not just how do we write things for the Internet, it really means a remaking of a number of things. We'll need a new operating system,” Ballmer stated.
The “new operating system” reference places the new project developed by Microsoft somewhere between Windows Killer and the evolution of the Windows platform. In this context, Ballmer explained that Windows Cloud is nothing more than Microsoft's natural response to delivering an operating system designed for an infrastructure beyond the PC, mobile devices or servers.
“Just as we have an operating system for the PC, for the phone, and for the server, we need a new operating system that runs in the Internet. I bet we'll call it Windows something. We're going to announce it in four weeks. We might even have a trademark by then. So, for today I'll call it Windows Cloud. And Windows Cloud will be a place where you can run arbitrary applications up in the Internet that runs .NET,” Ballmer added.
Owning over 90% of the operating system market when it comes to desktop clients, Microsoft is in fact building on its vision of Software plus Services with Windows Cloud. This is why Windows Cloud is positioned as an evolution of the Windows Server platform. According to Ballmer, the first Beta build of Windows Cloud and the actual trademark name of the product are planned for availability by the end of this month at PDC2008.
“We need to remake our development platform and our management and deployment tools so that the software really can move around to the PC, across servers magically. That involves taking .NET, our programming surface, to the next level,” Ballmer explained. “Part of that means putting .NET in the browser, which we've done with our Silverlight technology. And yet I don't think the whole world lives in a browser. PC applications have better user interface, and you can integrate them more. Browser applications run on non-Windows machines, and they're easier to manage. We need to bring the benefits of both of those things together on Windows, and through our Silverlight technology permit the targeting of other systems.”