Vista to be Replaced in Under Three Years?

By Greg McNevin

February 12th, 2007: Vista may have only just hit shelves around the world, however, Microsoft is already eyeing its successor suggesting that its next operating system could be upon us before 2010.

Codenamed “Vienna”, Microsoft wants to have its next offering out within two and a half years, or half the amount of time between XP and Vista.

“You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with,” said Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division to PCWorld.com. “That’s a good time frame for refresh.”

According to Fathi, this would put the release date for Vienna at the end of 2009. While details are currently scant, Fathi has hinted at what the company will be looking at features-wise for Vienna.

“We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Maybe it’s a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It’s too early for me to talk about it. But over the next few months I think you’re going to start hearing more and more.”

With security companies such as Symantec possibly waiting until mid-2008 for the final APIs to give them access to the Vista core, and a Vista service pack (codenamed "Fiji") still to come, Microsoft already talking about the next release could leave some wondering why they should go through the hassle, expense and even risk of deploying an OS that has so far spent little time in the wild.

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