Microsoft Freak : Vista Follow-up Likely in 2009

Vista Follow-up Likely in 2009

With Vista just out the door, Microsoft Corp. is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product’s core components.

That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP, but Vista was exceptional, said Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

Microsoft originally planned for its XP follow-up to include a number of radical changes to Windows, including a new file system and a reinvented user interface, but after the company’s products were hit by widespread worm outbreaks in 2003, Microsoft redirected almost its entire engineering effort to locking down Windows with the XP Service Pack 2 release.