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Windows 7 cleans up

Posted on 16 Jun 2009 at 00:00

While welcoming the arrival of a virtual windows xp in windows 7, Jon Honeyball still fears that Microsoft isn't being brave enough.

The arrival of Windows 7 at Release Candidate (RC) stage is a cause for celebration, for several reasons. It would have surprised no-one had there been last-minute delays, as Microsoft is notorious for fiddling right up to the final second. And it has indeed done a little fiddle this time, although the story is more complicated and I'll come back to it in a minute. We should be happy that 7 has made it to RC and is thus, as we used to say, just about "ready to ship".

Of course, the oldie-worldy schema that deemed the stages of software development to be "complete code for first beta; keep testing throughout the betas; iron out the wobbles; go to RC and ship" hasn't been applied for a very long time now. "Beta 1" nowadays can mean anything to anyone, and most certainly doesn't imply either code or feature completeness. The pressure to stuff more and more features into a product means that it just isn't feasible to keep to such sensible old timescales, when frantic (and rather worrying) haste is now universally expected. An early May release for RC1 means that there's still the possibility of getting product out the door by midsummer, ready for the big sales push that happens for the start of a new academic year, and if this date is missed then the next "interesting" one is obviously Christmas.

In a past column, I've suggested that Microsoft might well go for the date of 7 July for a formal unveiling of Windows 7, since the symbolism of all those sevens would be just too tempting to the marketing wonks. This raised the ire of some readers, one of whom wrote to me saying: "As I read your piece in issue 176, I was astounded by your estimation of the Windows 7 launch date. I almost BSODed when I read 7/7, the date of the atrocious bomb attacks on our nation's capital. If Microsoft were to launch its 'new' OS on this date, I and many others would switch to Apple and never look back."

I wrote back to said reader, pointing out that not only would Microsoft probably have been unaware of anything that had happened outside of the continental US, but also that the best way of remembering the victims of 7/7 was to carry on with daily life as normal. Numerological superstition is still superstition whether it's "the seventh son of a seventh son" or the date of a terrorist attack. Anyway, it's now early May and there's still no sign of a launch date and 7/7 is just around the corner, so maybe my conjecture was just a hunch that failed. Maybe Microsoft will confound everyone by going for a November launch after all - who can tell at this point?

Although there's been a huge amount of beta debugging and "under the covers" bug fixing, there isn't a great deal in RC1 to differentiate it from the Beta build, which is as it should be. That was until the point where it leaked that Microsoft was going to do something funny with virtualisation in Windows 7. When I first heard this news I was all aquiver with expectation - had Microsoft finally listened to those of us who said that Windows needs a radical overhaul, and the best way to do that would be to make the base OS far smaller by doing away with the compatibility stuff required to support apps from previous versions? Then it could use Hyper-V technology to bring up an install of XP for XP apps, for example, or better still have an onion-like arrangement of trusted layers within the OS, so that only properly signed code could run in one sandbox and unsigned code would be pushed into a different "dirty" sandbox?