Windows Vista has been out for only a few weeks and Microsoft is already talking about the next step. In an attempt to avert something similar to the five year wait Windows XP users experienced waiting for Vista, Microsoft has disclosed details on the successor to Vista, codenamed Vienna. WinFS, native HD DVD capabilities, and FireWire-B may be addressed in the first service pack for Vista but there is a chance some of these features may not make it into an MS operating system until Vienna.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has already proclaimed that there is "More where that came from" when it comes to operating systems. According to PC World, 2009 is when we can expect more "wow" from Microsoft. During that year, Microsoft is expected to release the follow-up to Windows Vista which is codenamed Vienna. Microsoft doesn't want another repeat of the 5-year drought between the release of Windows XP and Windows Vista, so the company is accelerating its plans for its next generation operating system. The time and effort that should have been exerted on Windows Vista were instead diverted to getting Windows XP SP2 out the door. "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," said Ben Fathi, a corporate VP in Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division.