Windows Vista, Windows Fiji and the Windows Seven. This is what we should expect out of Microsoft following the January 30, 2007 commercial release of Windows Vista. For some time, speculations have pointed out that Windows Fiji is in fact the first Service Pack for Windows Vista. As Microsoft is officially not commenting any details related to the upcoming versions of Windows, these speculations have floated around for a while.

However, Charlie Owen, a product manager on the Media Center team, revealed that Windows Fiji is in fact the upcoming release of Windows Media Center. Microsoft's history of releases for Windows Media Center editions reads something like this, by codename: Freestyle | 2002, Harmony | 2003, Symphony | 2004, Emerald | 2005 and Diamond | 2006.

"Diamond is the version of Windows Media Center which ships with Windows Vista, and is the only version of Windows Media Center (to date) which was synced with a major version of Windows. All prior releases were 'Windows Out Of Band Release' projects -- meaning they weren't necessarily tied to a particular shipping date of Windows (or a Windows service pack)," Owen said.

With Windows Fiji, the upcoming release of Windows Media Center, the Redmond Company will switch back to out of band releases. This means that Windows Fiji will be an out of band release between Windows Vista and Windows Seven/Vienna, formerly Blackcomb.

"Our next version is yet another out of band release and (generally speaking) the team is pretty happy about that because it allows us to get back on our (approximate) yearly schedule of delivering goodness to customers (it was a major feat of engineering load balancing for us to be simultaneously working on 'Emerald' and 'Diamond' at the same time -- a story for some other time). For the obvious follow up: Sorry, no dates or specific milestones to share, and past performance is not indicative of future release dates. Suffice it to say we are hard at work defining and coding the next version," Owen added.