Will Windows 7 see as radical a facelift as Office 2007? That’s harder to tell, because the change in Office 2007 wasn’t made for change’s sake: Larsen-Green went back to first principles for the suite, and she’s likely to do exactly the same for Windows. Starting with a clean slate, she’ll be asking what people expect their computer to do, and then how an OS should fit in with that. But its safe to say that feral UI elements such as Vista’s ‘icon overload’ Control Panel are not long for this world.
Windows to go fluid: the designer of the Office 2007 "fluid" ribbon interface is in charge of interface design for the next version of Windows
The nuked Channel 9 post which placed virtualisation on the Windows 7 blueprint also indicated that the look of the UI would be highly customisable, perhaps implying a de-coupling of the top-most user interface layer from the actual Explorer shell.
(It’s worth noting that Microsoft has already decoupled the ‘Explorer’ shell from the OS in Windows Server 2008, which permits admins to install the core alone - called a ‘Server Core’ install – and then interact with it entirely through the command line or via remote connection from a machine running the m management console.)
Proceed with confidence: Windows boss Steven Sinofsky and his winged henchmen. (Yes, we just couldn't resist the opportunity to re-use this graphic.)We’re not getting too excited about all that, however, because we’ve heard it before. This writer was in the bunker at Redmond with two dozen other US and international IT scribes when Microsoft lifted the covers off ‘Whistler’ to reveal Windows XP and said that the new ‘Luna’ shell would be completely customisable. That never came to pass.
We were told the same thing about Vista, back in the earliest days of Longhorn, before the UI eventually underwent more cosmetic surgery than Michael Jackson (and, some say, ended up just as unstable). Once again, the task of making the UI skinnable fell to third-party companies.
So that’s the skinny on Windows 7, at least until the next leak or the first official statement from Team Sinofsky. As we’ve said, these are just the first few miles on the long road to Windows 7 – but so far it looks like being a fascinating journey!
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