Microsoft has long offered the option to downgrade a Windows license and replace newer versions of its operating system with an older edition. This, however, gained notoriety with Windows Vista following numerous complaints from disgruntled users and computer makers actually advertising machines that were pre-downgraded to XP. Microsoft hopes to change this with Windows 7 – if early reviews are anything to go by it probably will – but it does plan to keep offering users a downgrade option.

In fact, Microsoft and its PC partners are going to allow Windows 7 users to downgrade not just to Vista but also to Windows XP. The company claims this is not the first time it has offered downgrade rights to a version other than its immediate predecessor, and clarified that selling XP to OEMs doesn’t necessarily mean it will continue to be supported. Microsoft is still expected to end mainstream support for the OS on April 14 and provide only security updates beyond that date. Downgrades will still cost interested consumers, presumably, as the software giant hasn’t detailed exactly how downgrade rights will work with Windows 7.

[SOURCE: http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/

4/8/microsoft-offers-downgrade-options-windows-7-xp/]

At the recent Wharton Business Technology Conference, Steven Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, unveiled the latest future montage video from Microsoft Office Labs. The video, known simply as 2019, provides a sneak peek at the future according to Microsoft. The widespread use of surface and touchscreen devices coupled with ubiquitous wireless connectivity provides a future worthy of any science fiction novel. It is an interesting watch and will be even more interesting as the future unfolds and we see which of these technologies come to fruition. Hit the jump for the video.

Source: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/03/01/microsoft-unveils-its-vision-for-the-future/

Additional news pertaining to Windows 7 was released earlier this week. This comes barely a month after the generally positive response to the first public beta of Microsoft’s next iteration of the Windows operating system. Though it’s not yet announced via official channels, a number of Internet sites have independently confirmed with Microsoft that there will be six versions of Windows 7 when it is finally released:

Microsoft may release to developers a trial version of its forthcoming Windows 7 operating system as soon as next week, according to a note on one of the company’s Web sites.

“Attend an upcoming MSDN Developer Conference and you will receive a Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD,” Microsoft said on a site it maintains for software developers. The next such conference is Tuesday in Chicago, according to the site, with other conferences scheduled for cities across the country throughout January.

The site promises that developers who attend one of the conferences will be “among the first to see Windows 7.” It also states that attendees will receive preview access to Windows Azure, an operating system that Microsoft is developing for cloud computing environments.

For those who can’t wait, an early build of a Windows 7 beta has appeared on numerous, legally questionable, file sharing sites. “I’m using this OS as I type,” wrote a Pirate Bay user going by the name ‘al966g’. “Looks like it’s OK to me, not too much different than Vista but a few new items,” the user wrote.

The user noted that he had Windows 7 running on a relatively underpowered Pentium 4 computer with only 768 MB of RAM. Vista, by contrast, was widely criticized for steep hardware requirements that forced users to upgrade their PCs.

A final version of Windows 7 isn’t expected until late 2009 or early 2010.

(Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems… )

Screenshots:

More screenshots : http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-7…

Windows 7 Boot Screen Video:

You may have heard about ” Cloud Computing”. Some people says that Microsoft going to launch a new OS,  ”Windows Cloud”. It is right of-course! but not the OS is like XP or Vista.  It is purely based on Internet and a light software to handle that. So you may wonder, whats that “Cloud Computing” actually? For instance, If an entrepreneur’s office is based at UK, and  often travels to France or somewhere for the business purpose, It is quiet hard to manage his Computer Applications. Hence he/she can use Google Applications instead. which can be accessible from anywhere around the globe, if there is Internet facility is available. You can make presentations online,  or wanna write documentation? use Google Docs! and worrying for separate accounts? Everything will come under a single account. For E.g. you can use your google account to access all the google services from Gmail to Google Docs (Yeah! even Orkut!). Such services are managed by several servers and each for specific purposes. Hence a Cloud of servers! The Cloud Computing. 

Check out this video for understanding Cloud Computing.

Windows Cloud:

Steve Ballmer at CIGREF:

Some of the statements of Steve Ballmer at CIGREF( Club Informatique des Grandes Entreprises Françaises) meeting on 2nd Oct, 2008 follows:

 “… Microsoft as a company is trying to play in that world by building seamless experiences that leverage that power: the magic of software, the power of the Internet, a world of devices: PCs, TVs, phones, servers in the enterprise, services in the Internet cloud, and software that distributes itself and manages itself…”

“…When we talk about software plus services at Microsoft, we think it means not just how do we write things for the Internet, it really means a remaking of a number of things.

We’ll need a new operating system. Just as we have an operating system for the PC, for the phone, and for the server, we need a new operating system that runs in the Internet. I bet we’ll call it Windows something. We’re going to announce it in four weeks. We might even have a trademark by then. So, for today I’ll call it Windows Cloud. And Windows Cloud will be a place where you can run arbitrary applications up in the Internet that runs .NET…”

“…We are going to build on the present as we get there. This is the direction; the world is going to move to this world. And yet I don’t think anytime soon you’re going to shut down your datacenters and move everything to the cloud.

We will tell you about it, we’ll encourage you, but at the same time our strategy is to build a symmetric stack: Windows Server, Windows Cloud; Active Directory, Active Directory with Live IDs as an identity system in the Internet; SQL Server and an implementation of SQL Server for the cloud. We now have CRM; CRM in the cloud. We have SharePoint; SharePoint in the cloud. We’ve got Exchange; Exchange in the cloud…”

“…The Windows cloud is not yet available, but we’ll be announcing its beta availability soon.

Some of the social computing technologies are available for trial today under the Live Mesh name on our Web sites, but they’re in beta form initially for the consumer market.

The SQL Server data services are currently available, but will be quite a bit enhanced, and Microsoft CRM Online is available…”

(Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2008/10-02CIGREF.mspx )

Windows Azure:

“Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform’s role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing. The Azure Services Platform is an industry-leading move by Microsoft to help developers build the next generation of applications that will span from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and phone.”

(Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-27PDCDay1PR.mspx )

“Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.”

(source: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx )

Windows Azure is a cloud computing service, which has several servers interconnect and offers developer’s required services such as building web applications, .NET services, SQL services, Sharepoints and CRM services as well. These can be obtained online and it is the best service for the developers.

In future, may be in 10 year, everything going to be light, simple, flexible, easy access,better performance and go on.. Cloud Computing is one among them which reduces the spendings over the Infrastucture and Storage. So be clear with cloud computing and i hope this post helped you to learn about it little.