Windows 7 to be the end of the line?

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 10:20

IT Industry - Development

But Chawla doesn't think Microsoft is a spent force. He believes it has "other products in the pipeline offering scope to redefine the computing landscape".

"As a large organisation, Microsoft finds it difficult to react to rapid changes in the market on a timely basis," he said.

"But with its largesse comes a huge R&D budget of $10 billion a year, so it will remain a formidable player in the market regardless of the future of desktop computing."

While Microsoft has been pursuing a 'software+services' strategy - blending the advantages of desktop and cloud software - for some time, Sarah Vaughn, commercial manager for Windows 7 at Microsoft Australia told iTWire "there will absolutely be a next release of Windows [following Windows 7]."

"It's never as simple as moving everything to the cloud," she said. While there are various scenarios for application delivery, there is a persistent need for disconnected computing.

And Microsoft principal research program manager Phil Fawcett recently told iTWire's Alex Zaharov-Reutt that his teams are already thinking about what Windows 9 will look like, and that a product team has already started work on Windows 8.

So while Chawla might be right about the growing importance of cloud computing and virtualisation, it seems unlikely that Windows 7 will be the final desktop version of Windows.