Microsoft decided on the name of its upcoming operating system. We believe that the company considered the development process way too important to waste any time on finding a name, as the OS will simply be called Windows 7.

The announcement was made by Mike Nash, Volish Veep of Windows product management, through a blog post. He explained the new name in just a few words: "Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore 'Windows 7' just makes sense," he said.

He also talked about the previous releases, as there have been several different approaches to naming the operating systems. The company used numbers (Windows 3.11), dates (Windows 98) and also "aspirational" monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista. The names with dates did not make sense, as there isn’t a new version of Windows available every year and referring to the "aspirational" names, he said that they don’t "do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows."

He concluded that the company’s officials are extremely excited about the upcoming announcements, scheduled for the weeks to come, which will provide information on the features of Windows 7 and show that they continued the investment and quest begun with Windows Vista to deliver a highly functional and user-friendly operating system.

So far, Microsoft released several very popular systems, such as Windows 95, NT Workstation, Windows 98, Millennium, Windows 2000 and XP, each one taking the computing experience to the next level. XP’s successor, Windows Vista was received at the time with great enthusiasm but soon after, many reports surfaced about its flaws and system errors, causing a general discontent that actually led to many customers demanding a downgrade to XP, in order to save time and work more efficiently. Even though it appeared that Microsoft was going to leave things as they were and not address the complaints with a damage control campaign, the company decided to act on it and announced a $300 advertising effort meant to change the general perception and boost, once again, its popularity. The commercials starred Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Gates and many other celebrities and even though at first the message wasn’t very clear, the ongoing campaign is considered a success.

The company considers this launch extremely important, as it should erase the bad memories linked to Vista and ensure that Microsoft’s OS’s are trust-worthy once again.

Microsoft announced that developers will receive access to a "pre-beta developer-only release" of Windows 7 at the forthcoming Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) which are scheduled to take place on the 27th of October and the 5th of November respectively.

The final version of Windows 7 is expected to be released sometime in 2009, most likely in its second half and the expectations and pressure are extremely high.