In the beginning of April, when he was still in business so to say, during the speech held at the Inter-American Development Bank in Miami, Bill Gates mentioned Windows 7, but besides saying the new operating system would be launched as early as 2009, he wasn’t very talkative.

After several weeks, at the end of May, during the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, Julie Larson-Green, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows experience program management, presented a series of features that were to be included in the upcoming Windows 7. Several Multi-touch technology based applications were shown in the company’s attempt to get everyone hyped up about its product; some were photography-related features, with the help of which users can handle digital photos way easier; another was the use of an on-screen piano keyboard by direct screen contact.

This week on Thursday, Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan, senior engineering managers for Windows 7, handled the launch of the Engineering Windows 7 (E7) blog. Among other things, they said Microsoft had learned from its previous mistakes and the team is not going to "get ahead of itself" with talks about upcoming features until they are fully understood. With regard to the newly unveiled blog, they said the pre-release communication it will provide will ensure the fact that company people have "a reasonable degree of confidence" in the issues they will approach in future talks.

For those who wish to find out specifics about Windows 7, the two managers provided some good news when they said the company would reveal a lot more at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles.

There have been some serious talks about Microsoft’s operating systems lately; while Vista sales are indeed going up, there are a lot of customers who had complained about several issues. As many business customers have decided to keep on using XP until Windows 7 is out, at the beginning of June, Microsoft issued a white paper encouraging the reticent to give Vista a shot. Mike Nash, Microsoft Vice President of Product Management, said that by choosing not to get Vista, customers would be "missing out on the proven benefits such as better security, productivity, search, mobility, manageability, and infrastructure optimization."

Earlier this year, at the Gartner Emerging Trends conference in Las Vegas, two Gartner analysts, Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver, talked about several Windows-related problems. One of the most serious was considered to be the operating system’s lack of adaptability. Another problem was found in Windows' rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it quite difficult to promptly provide significant changes for a new version. The thing that confirmed this was Vista, as Microsoft returned to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 for Vista’s foundation, once it saw no actual progress in five years of development efforts. During the same conference, Gartner also said that "Windows as we know it must be replaced."

Perhaps the upcoming Windows 7 will take care of all the problems previously identified and bring users everywhere a new, stable and innovative software.