Microsoft has publicly announced the intent to release Windows 7 (codename "Vienna") by the end of 2009. This release is intended to be a major release and is rumored to have immense improvements over Windows Vista. Yet all of this makes me question why anyone would have purchased Vista in 2007 with this knowledge? Is Vista to blame for the early announcement of Windows 7?

Vista has many problems, and some of which that should be huge concerns:

• Windows Vista performs very poorly against its younger brother Windows XP.
• Vista has not really had the backing from game developers thus far.
• Vista is a disappointment when compared to features that were promised in development.
• There have not been any essential features added that would be useful to personal usage.
• Hardware compatibility is still not up to par when compared to XP.
• Open source alternatives to Vista are equal, if not considerably better in quality and security.

Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division even admitted to shortcomings in development, "We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile." He further states, "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release.

There is allegedly one good thing about Vista. The system has managed to implement tighter security, but even that is being questioned. Other than that, what happened to all the other great features that Vista was promised to have?

There is only so much that can be done with Vista development. The company needs to focus heavily on either the improvement of Vista, the development of Windows 7, or the development of both to ensure that the company does not make the same mistakes again.

However, we have Windows 7 to look forward to. The details of the Windows 7 release have been sketchy. It is very likely that the operating system will include the new file system, WinFS, that was cut from Vista. I would also expect to see significant performance improvements. It would be a wise plan for Microsoft to deliver on any features they announce will be in Windows 7.

The announcement of Windows 7 was clearly put into action because of the shortcomings of Windows Vista. The company must secretly feel that they have not fully delivered with Vista's offerings and are working on a new product to make up for the failures.

This could be a wise move considering the rapid growth of open source operating systems. Microsoft certainly does not want all their future customers switching to Ubuntu, even though I believe it would serve as a great lesson to Microsoft if they did.