What’s next for Microsoft Windows? With Windows 7 now nineteen months old, plenty of people are curious about its successor, a product which everybody’s calling Windows 8 even though it hasn’t been officially named yet. At the moment, however, all we know for sure is that we hardly know anything at all.
Last month, for instance, the tech blogosphere was aflutter over leaked screen shots of a Windows 8 app store that looked very much like Apple’s Mac App Store. Interesting stuff — except that the screens turned out to be fakes. Then an executive from chip giant Intel spoke about some of Windows 8’s technical aspects at the company’s investor meeting — only to have Microsoft respond with a statement that called her comments “factually inaccurate and unfortunately misleading.”
Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to be slightly befuddled. At a developer event in Tokyo this week, he talked up Windows 8, saying that it would arrive on a variety of cool PCs, tablets, and other devices next year. And then a Microsoft spokesperson said that Ballmer apparently misspoke.
The fog may start to lift next week. That’s when Windows honcho Steven Sinofsky is scheduled to take the stage at the Wall Street Journal’s swanky “D” conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Judging from prior behavior by Microsoft execs at past conferences, it’s reasonable to assume that he’ll provide a peek of Windows 8 — nothing all-encompassing, but enough to whet the world’s appetite for an operating system that’s likely to reach PCs in the second half of 2012.
