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Windows 7 gets its head in the cloud
PCW's Tim Anderson was trying out the new Windows 7 at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference yesterday. Iain Thomson, our Man in America, was also there, concluding the new operating system looks like everything Vista should have been but wasn't.
Meanwhile techie hacks like myself, stuck in wintry London, were also being briefed on the changes to come.
John Curran, head of Windows Client for the UK, got off to a bad start by promising that W7 will run on Vista hardware. None of that buying a new machine and then finding you have to upgrade it to cope with the new OS. This, he said, was a core aim of the new code.
Now this may well turn out to be the case, given that Microsoft is trying to streamline the code. But having been given this promise before every major Windows launch since Windows 95, only to be find that upgrades were needed, I begged leave to be sceptical until W7 is launched - which will be late 2009 or 2010 on current schedule. (It was also the case with Windows 3.0, the first version to take off, but there was some excuse then because hardware was still way short of the needs of current software).
Also, clearly, touch screens will be needed to take full advantage of promised improvements in gesture control and handwriting recognition. Few current desktops have touch screens. I've tried HP's lovely TouchSmart PC, which is great for tasks such as flicking through photo albums; but touch input adds comparatively little to the sit-up-and-beg mode of using a computer and is not a compelling reason to upgrade a desktop monitor.
It is dangerous to make predictions on such matters, but it does seem possible that mobile and desktop interfaces will diverge to the extent that they will have completely different front ends. This has already happened with Apple's iTouch, but that is not a proper workface. Anyway, Curran says there is no chance of W7 having different faces for the mobile and desktop.
The increased emphasis on non-keyboard input also raises questions about the hardware. Much of it would benefit from specialist processors, or processor cores, rather than dumping all the work onto a general-purpose device. Microsoft will presumably be encouraging hardware designers to optimise for the emerging software, taking W7 machines further away from current designs.
Before I get into the cloud, here's some of Curran's W7 bullet points:
• The OS will retain the Vista kernel to avoid the compatibility problems that happened with the transition from XP.
• The taskbar is to be revamped, organising icons into groups. If you hover over an icon it will be enlarged.
• Home networking will be more plug-and-play, using "home groups" similar to Vista's workgroups. It will be far easier for the family to share (or not) files and resources like printers.
• Leading on from this. You will be able to push content to devices using technologies such as UPnP and DNLA - provided, of course, that the devices are compliant. For instance you could tell you PC to play a video on your kitchen TV.
Two other benefits are of more interest to companies:
• Bit Locker, offering full drive encryption, will be extended to USB drives. Any W7 machine will be able to decrypt your data
• Direct Access. Secure remote access will be built into W7, allowing you to connect easily to your home or office machine with the security of a VPN without the hassle of setting it up.
The cloud on the horizon appears with Microsoft's announcement that it is to drop Vista's Calendar,Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Contacts applications. This small and apparently pointless move is in fact a counterstrike against Google, which is offering a suite of office applications that can be used on and offline.
Microsoft will offer online versions of the client apps, plus cut down versions of apps such as Word, that can be used online via a browser using a variety of devices. Also available will be a set of client apps that you can download - or that may be bundled with a PC, if the vendor wishes.
Presumably vendor wishes are being considered because one reason Microsoft got into trouble with the anti-trust authorities was the accusation that it was using the Windows desktop to push its own products at the expense of rivals. That particular issue looks rather dated now, considering the power of Google and the way Apple shamelessly locks its users into its services.
The point of the client apps, which Google also offers, is to combine the advantages of online and offline work, Online work can be accessed by any computer and is automatically saved, but you need a good connection; the client apps allow you to keep local copies, work on them offline, and then synchronise files when you go back online.
What this is going to do to Microsoft's lucrative Office suite revenues is anyone's guess but the company has long known that it could not corner the market for ever. All the processing will be done on the new Azure platform and its awesome data centres. Each user will have 5GB of free storage space.
One of the most interesting new offerings is called Live Mesh, a beta version of which you can try out now. If you use several computers you can set up a "mesh ring* with a shared storage space accessible by any of them. You can set up folders just like on you own PC and any changes to documents will be mirrored on any of your meshed computers when they go online.
Online storage sites Humyo already offers something like this but Microsoft is taking the idea further. For one thing any meshed computer can have remote desktop access to any other one in the same ring. Also you can invite other people into the mesh to share folders and enable collaboration on projects.
Live Mesh product manager Ian Moulster says it is also possible to build applications on the Mesh platform.
All this adds up to a sharp change of direction by Microsoft, perhaps its biggest since it jumped on to the web bandwagon. It was behind the curve on that one but managed to strongarm itself into a leading position. Its rivals these days (unlike browser pioneer Netscape) are too big to bully and even if they weren't Microsoft could not get away with crushing them.
Windows 7 is still perhaps 15 months away, which is a long time for Google and Amazon and the rest to get their heads firmly established in the Cloud.
Meanwhile techie hacks like myself, stuck in wintry London, were also being briefed on the changes to come.
John Curran, head of Windows Client for the UK, got off to a bad start by promising that W7 will run on Vista hardware. None of that buying a new machine and then finding you have to upgrade it to cope with the new OS. This, he said, was a core aim of the new code.
Now this may well turn out to be the case, given that Microsoft is trying to streamline the code. But having been given this promise before every major Windows launch since Windows 95, only to be find that upgrades were needed, I begged leave to be sceptical until W7 is launched - which will be late 2009 or 2010 on current schedule. (It was also the case with Windows 3.0, the first version to take off, but there was some excuse then because hardware was still way short of the needs of current software).
Also, clearly, touch screens will be needed to take full advantage of promised improvements in gesture control and handwriting recognition. Few current desktops have touch screens. I've tried HP's lovely TouchSmart PC, which is great for tasks such as flicking through photo albums; but touch input adds comparatively little to the sit-up-and-beg mode of using a computer and is not a compelling reason to upgrade a desktop monitor.
It is dangerous to make predictions on such matters, but it does seem possible that mobile and desktop interfaces will diverge to the extent that they will have completely different front ends. This has already happened with Apple's iTouch, but that is not a proper workface. Anyway, Curran says there is no chance of W7 having different faces for the mobile and desktop.
The increased emphasis on non-keyboard input also raises questions about the hardware. Much of it would benefit from specialist processors, or processor cores, rather than dumping all the work onto a general-purpose device. Microsoft will presumably be encouraging hardware designers to optimise for the emerging software, taking W7 machines further away from current designs.
Before I get into the cloud, here's some of Curran's W7 bullet points:
• The OS will retain the Vista kernel to avoid the compatibility problems that happened with the transition from XP.
• The taskbar is to be revamped, organising icons into groups. If you hover over an icon it will be enlarged.
• Home networking will be more plug-and-play, using "home groups" similar to Vista's workgroups. It will be far easier for the family to share (or not) files and resources like printers.
• Leading on from this. You will be able to push content to devices using technologies such as UPnP and DNLA - provided, of course, that the devices are compliant. For instance you could tell you PC to play a video on your kitchen TV.
Two other benefits are of more interest to companies:
• Bit Locker, offering full drive encryption, will be extended to USB drives. Any W7 machine will be able to decrypt your data
• Direct Access. Secure remote access will be built into W7, allowing you to connect easily to your home or office machine with the security of a VPN without the hassle of setting it up.
The cloud on the horizon appears with Microsoft's announcement that it is to drop Vista's Calendar,Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Contacts applications. This small and apparently pointless move is in fact a counterstrike against Google, which is offering a suite of office applications that can be used on and offline.
Microsoft will offer online versions of the client apps, plus cut down versions of apps such as Word, that can be used online via a browser using a variety of devices. Also available will be a set of client apps that you can download - or that may be bundled with a PC, if the vendor wishes.
Presumably vendor wishes are being considered because one reason Microsoft got into trouble with the anti-trust authorities was the accusation that it was using the Windows desktop to push its own products at the expense of rivals. That particular issue looks rather dated now, considering the power of Google and the way Apple shamelessly locks its users into its services.
The point of the client apps, which Google also offers, is to combine the advantages of online and offline work, Online work can be accessed by any computer and is automatically saved, but you need a good connection; the client apps allow you to keep local copies, work on them offline, and then synchronise files when you go back online.
What this is going to do to Microsoft's lucrative Office suite revenues is anyone's guess but the company has long known that it could not corner the market for ever. All the processing will be done on the new Azure platform and its awesome data centres. Each user will have 5GB of free storage space.
One of the most interesting new offerings is called Live Mesh, a beta version of which you can try out now. If you use several computers you can set up a "mesh ring* with a shared storage space accessible by any of them. You can set up folders just like on you own PC and any changes to documents will be mirrored on any of your meshed computers when they go online.
Online storage sites Humyo already offers something like this but Microsoft is taking the idea further. For one thing any meshed computer can have remote desktop access to any other one in the same ring. Also you can invite other people into the mesh to share folders and enable collaboration on projects.
Live Mesh product manager Ian Moulster says it is also possible to build applications on the Mesh platform.
All this adds up to a sharp change of direction by Microsoft, perhaps its biggest since it jumped on to the web bandwagon. It was behind the curve on that one but managed to strongarm itself into a leading position. Its rivals these days (unlike browser pioneer Netscape) are too big to bully and even if they weren't Microsoft could not get away with crushing them.
Windows 7 is still perhaps 15 months away, which is a long time for Google and Amazon and the rest to get their heads firmly established in the Cloud.
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