Interop New York To Shine Spotlight On Mobility, Cloud Computing

Microsoft's OS developers need to be more sure-handed than ever these days--given the number of balls they've got in the air.

In addition to ongoing support for the most current version of the Windows operating system, Vista, the company is now working on no less than three other OS's, according to official Microsoft statements and Internet records.

The software maker's ability to successfully keep it all in the air, without dropping anything, could go a long way toward helping it recover from the publicity nightmare that is Windows Vista, which has been shunned by most corporate IT managers and mocked as slow and stodgy in Apple's consumer ads.

Up next for Microsoft is Windows 7. The company has said little about Vista's most immediate successor, other than that it plans to ship it sometime in 2010. It has revealed that Windows 7 shares much of Vista's code base, meaning that applications that don't run properly on Vista won't likely perform well on 7, either.

Microsoft's message: Don't let compatibility problems keep you from upgrading from XP to Vista, because you'll inevitably have to deal with those issues anyway when Windows 7 rolls around.

Beyond Windows 7, Microsoft's operating system roadmap gets murkier.

It's possible that, having learned from the Vista fiasco that what appeals to consumers may be less attractive to tech pros, the company is planning to split its operating system business into commercial and retail segments, producing separate products with vastly different architectures.

That would help explain "Midori", the existence of which Microsoft confirmed to InformationWeek in an e-mail Wednesday...

Read the rest of my blog and leave a comment here.

Paul McDougall
[email protected]
www.informationweek.com

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