Microsoft's Windows boss, Steven Sinofsky, has talked in a rare interview about the successor to Windows Vista, Windows 7. The reclusive expert has succeeded Jim Allchin to the helm of Microsoft's top product. Previously, he headed the Microsoft Office department.

Steven Sinofsky told prominent blogger Ina Fried that Windows 7 will be coming out around January 2010. The surprise is the fact that it will not have a new kind of kernel, as most people have expected, but it will rather be an improvement of Vista's kernel. In fact, it will be a revamping of Windows Server 2008's kernel which in turn is an evolution of Vista.

This is both good and bad. Strategically, it is a safe choice. Microsoft just could not launch two incompatible operating systems one after the other. For example, Vista does not work with XP drivers, as neither does a lot of software written for XP. An entirely new architecture would have meant that the scenario would have been repeated over again with Windows 7.

Instead, the next desktop Windows will work flawlessly with current Vista drivers and applications. It will come in two versions: 32-bit and 64-bit, and Sinofsky expects that there will be more 64-bit users at the time it gets released. Currently, the 64-bit operating systems for desktops have started off slowly, as most people use only 32-bit software. Most new processors support 64-bit as well as 32-bit.

Steven Sinofsky was, overall, pretty tight lipped despite Fried's repeated attempts to make him tell us a little bit more. Sinofsky kept talking some nonsense about Microsoft ecosystem, refusing to go into further detail about the actual product that his team is working on, other than the projected release date and the information about kernel development.