Hyderabad, Aug. 3

Designers and engineers at Microsoft R&D centre in India have a new mandate for development of Windows 7, the next generation operating system from Microsoft Corporation, slated for release in 2009-10.

This new operating system will have in-built features to address networking-related issues, virtualisation that helps create separate machines within a PC and various plug-ins for accessories for the new OS.

The Senior Vice-President, Windows Core Operating System Division, Mr Jon DeVaan, said they have created the necessary platform for development work in India following a recent meeting of the Windows 7 group at Redmond, the Microsoft headquarters. This team headed by Mr Sunil Bansali, and comprising members of the Windows and Windows Live development teams, has now been given the task of working on the next generation operating system.

The new operating system was earlier codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna. The interesting feature is it will have backward compatibility and work with older operating systems as well.

Referring to the virtualisation aspect of the next generation operating system, Mr DeVaan said “Virtualisation creates virtual machines on the Windows desktop, each of which virtualises the hardware of a complete physical computer. These virtual machines can be used to run operating systems such as MS DOS, Windows OS2. Engineers have built on lot of learning from Windows 2 days onwards and this is reflected in new development methodologies.”

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