Focus

Microsoft's Ben Fathi claimed on February 9, 2007 that the focus on the operating system was still being worked out, and could merely hint at some possibilities:

“

We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors. I don't know what it is" [...] "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers.

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Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek, suggested that the next version of Windows would "be more user-centric." When asked to clarify what he meant, Gates said:

“

That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.

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Later Gates also said that Windows 7 will also focus on performance improvements:

“

We're hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I'm very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don't have a lot of work to move that data back and forth.

”