Microsoft: Windows 7 to Include Multitouch Features

Microsoft is finally opening up about when Windows 7 will ship, but the company continues to share just a few, yet tantalizing details of what the eagerly anticipated OS update will be all about.
The latest tidbit to drop is multitouch interface support. At the Wall St. Journal's D Conference Tuesday evening in Carlsbad, Calif., company founder and chief software architect Bill Gates and chief executive Steve Ballmer are scheduled to unveil a laptop with a touchscreen that accepts multiple, simultaneous touches. The effect is quite reminiscent of what's possible with the world's most popular, commercially available gesture-based interface device: the iPhone .
Officially, Windows 7 is scheduled to ship three years after the general availability of Windows Vista , according to Microsoft. Vista's business editions launched on Nov. 30, 2006, which would mean the software could ship as early as that date in 2009, with a beta release in advance. Vista's editions for the home market launched Jan. 29, 2007.

Windows 7 Already a Threat to Vista

In case you hadn't noticed, the massive weight of interest has now almost completely shifted from Microsoft Windows Vista to the largely vaporware Windows 7.
This is testament to how royally screwed up Microsoft's Vista go-to-market plan has become. On the one hand, it insists that Vista is a huge success, with tons of sold licenses and happy customers. On the other, the company recently offered Windows XP Home as a low-cost PC OS. Clearly, there's a disconnect. Now, even more damaging to Vista, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer just used an important tech conference to preview major innovations on Windows 7.
If Windows Vista were a child, it would surely feel hurt, neglected, and stunned by the fact that its parents are favoring its still-unborn sibling, Windows 7.
The level of Windows 7 interest should be cause for significant concern in Redmond. Yet, I don't see so much hand-wringing as I do schizophrenia. There's the Vista group, which is gamely marching forward, trying to convince people that Vista is the operating system that they want and that they'll truly love it if they only give it a chance. Then there's the Window 7 group, which is populated, naturally, by some of the very same people. They're telling you how much better Windows 7 will be.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are also guilty of doublespeak. Each has been quoted extolling the virtues and success of Vista.

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Regardless of how Tablet PCs have actually done in the marketplace, Microsoft has always been a staunch proponent of touch interfaces, and it looks like the next version of Windows, currently under the codename Windows 7, will bundle in multi-touch features like those found in the iPhone and Microsoft's own Surface. The news comes from Microsoft engineer Hilton Locke, who blogged about Dell's multi-touch capable (but not enabled) Latitude XT earlier today, and added, "if you are impressed by the 'touch features' in the iPhone, you'll be blown away by what's coming in Windows 7." Locke went on to imply that it's been challenging selling touch to manufacturers, saying "Now if only we could convince more OEMs that Windows Touch Technology is going to drive their sales." That's a surprise to us -- that Big Ass Table demo pretty much sells itself, don't you think?

albatron-demos-22-inch-multi-touch-screen-for-windows-7

We didn't think it'd take too terribly long to make it happen, but Albatron is taking Microsoft's heed and is already demonstrating a prototype 22-inch monitor with multi-touch, intended for use with whatever Windows 7 will eventually come to be called. The early verdict on the 1680 x 1050 display? TG Daily says it "works much better than we expected," but we said the same thing about Surface when it debuted last year -- so maybe it simply works as well as it should.

microsoft-warns-hardware-makers-to-begin-windows-7-testing-asap

It may not even have a firm release date just yet, but it looks like Microsoft is already taking a pretty hard line on Windows 7, with it reportedly now warning hardware makers to begin testing their devices on the OS as soon as the first beta becomes available or risk not qualifying for its certified compatibility program. As Information Week points out, that move is likely being done in order to avoid the mess stirred up when so-called Vista-capable systems went on sale in advance of Vista's release, many of which, as we all know, turned out to be anything but.

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Microsoft may have only offered a glimpse of its promised multi-touch support in Windows 7 at D6 earlier this week, but the company apparently already has some of its longer term plans lined up, with it reportedly on track to release its multi-touch SDK at its Professional Developers' Conference in October of this year. Details on the SDK are otherwise expectedly light at the moment, however, with Microsoft only going so far as to say that its session at PDC will "highlight the new multi-touch gesture APIs and explain how you can leverage them in your applications."

asus-and-microsoft-working-an-eee-targeted-version-of-windows-7

So now that the nine-inch Eee is officially available with Windows XP pre-installed, people are wondering the obvious -- why XP and not Vista, since XP is being discontinued in June and Vista can kinda-sorta be made to run on an Eee? The answer, direct from Microsoft, is both obvious and a little surprising: Given the Eee's "other requirements," Asus and Microsoft "couldn't go the Vista route," presumably because the Eee doesn't really have the horsepower for it. Sure, but what caught our interest was that Microsoft is "in close discussions with Asus [regarding] how to take that forward... in regards to the Windows 7 Europe timeframe." Windows 7, you'll recall, has that lean new kernel, which would presumably make building a stripped-down version specifically for Eee-class machines easier -- but the last we heard, Windows 7 wasn't due until at least mid-2009 (and possibly not until 2011), so either Microsoft is planning to continue shipping XP after June or Windows 7 is coming much earlier than we thought. Our money is on XP continuing to soldier on, but here's hoping.

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Obviously a lot of people cried fake when those screenshots purporting to show Windows 7 Ultimate popped up -- possibly because they looked a lot like rebadged Vista screens -- so the blogger who originally posted the images has followed up with a video for proof. And we do have to say, if this is fake, someone put a hell of a lot of work into pulling it off, from creating a new bootup screen to hacking the source code to adding fresh Media Center options. ThinkNext tells us that this release -- known as Milestone 1 -- expires in May of this year, although if Redmond and its team of crack Enemy of the State-types have anything to say about it, this particular blog will not be getting another preview copy next time around. Video after the break.

Microsoft shows off "snippet" of Windows 7 at D6, reveals multi-touch support

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer got on stage at D6 with Walt and Kara to talk... Microsoft, of course. While the company is still being rather coy about Windows 7 -- some have blamed loose lips early on in Vista development for saddling the OS with too high of expectations and making things difficult for developers -- they were nice enough to show off what Ballmer called "the smallest snippet" of Windows 7. The big reveal was multi-touch support, which utilizes technology developed by the Surface team. The taskbar seems to have been reworked a bit, and the demo was running live on a Dell Latitude XT tablet. Apparently Microsoft is reworking the whole user interface with a multitouch experience in mind. Steve reiterated the "three years after Vista" mantra for availability. Not exactly earth-shattering, but we'll take what we can get at this point.

Windows 7 to get new touch features

It’s still early in the Windows 7 development process, but it sounds like new touch features already have made it onto the user-interface feature list.

Hilton Locke, who is with Microsoft’s Windows Shell team, in blogging about the newly introduced Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC, mentioned Windows 7’s planned touch support in a post this week:

“All I will say that if you are impressed by the ‘touch features’ in the iPhone, you’ll be blown away by what’s coming in Windows 7. Now if only we could convince more OEMs that Windows Touch Technology is going to drive their sales.”

Not being a Tablet PC fanatic, this touch UI revelation doesn’t do much for me. But it did get me thinking about a point made by a Mac-user friend of mine recently.

His theory: Neither Windows Vista nor Apple’s Leopard interfaces have met with universal user approval for the simple reason that Microsoft and Apple are trying too hard to emulate each other’s UI. Micorsoft tried too hard to appeal to users interested in a Mac-like experience, and Apple was too intent on making Leopard appealing to Windows switchers, my Mac-using chum posited. The result? Neither vendor made its core constituency happy.