Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky Talks About Windows 7...Sort Of

"Since taking over the Windows development reins from Jim Allchin, Steven Sinofsky has chosen to fall almost completely off the public radar...Well, Sinofsky is breaking his public silence, slightly, to offer a few important details about 7 (he reiterated that it is coming by January 2010) and to explain why he is saying so little publicly. In an exclusive interview with CNET News.com last week, Sinofsky talked about how the new version of Windows is designed to build on top of Vista's architectural changes without adding things like new driver models that can increase compatibility challenges. Below is the edited, but still rather lengthy transcript, of our conversation."

This is an interesting interview, in some ways because of what isn't said rather than what is said. You can tell that Sinofsky is very aware of the dangers of naming specific features that Windows 7 will have - we all remember how the feature list for Windows Vista started out long, and got shorter and shorter as it came closer to launch. Anyone remember WinFS? Ina Fried from C|NET does his best to get specifics out of Sinofsky, and near the end it gets kind of uncomfortable, but Sinofsky manages to say a lot without revealing much. What I take away from this article is that Windows 7 is underway, the teams are working hard on it, but no one is ready to talk about specifics yet - and I think that's fine. Vista still feels quite new in the overall ecosystem, and I'm certainly continuing to learn things about it (not all of them good mind you).

I think the concept that Microsoft should be talking about Windows 7, in detail, two years before it arrives to be slightly ridiculous - when was the last time Apple gave the world a two-year peek into its operating system plans? As usual, there's a double-standard that is applied to Microsoft, and there's no good reason for it. If Fried interviews Steve Jobs next, I hope he'll ask the same types of questions.