Preparan Windows 8

Windows 7 just went out the door, and already Microsoft is looking toward Windows 8.

At a recent software developer's conference, reports the website Australian Personal Computer, Microsoft laid out a preliminary roadmap for the successor to Windows 7. Codenamed "Windows 8", a slide from the conference shows a tentative launch year of 2012, making it about three years between Windows 7 and 8. (Note that a codename is a temporary name for a product in development. In most cases, the name changes; in the case of Windows 7, it didn't).

Whether Microsoft hits that target date, however, is another matter entirely. The company is very hit-and-miss about timelines established so far in advance. If Windows 7 ends up being a huge success, it wouldn't surprise me to see a new version of Windows delayed; there would be no great urgency to erase the memories of the last operating system, as happened with Windows Vista.