Microsoft Corp., who launched its Vista operating system about two weeks ago, said that it is going to replace the new operating system (OS) with the next-generation one as soon as in 2009, which would put the company back on the track of updating its OSs every two to three years. Unfortunately, the company does not disclose the main features of the new system as it “does not know”.

Historically Microsoft released a new desktop operating system every two to three years, at least, this was true for Windows 95, 98, ME and XP and was not particularly true for workstation OSes – there was a four-year gap between the NT4 and 2000. However, the latest operating system – Vista – shipped over five years after the XP because the company had to reassign software developers to patch the latter and release service pack 2. While it is uncertain whether the world’s largest software maker will need to patch Windows Vista, the company believes that it is on-track to release its code-named Vienna operating system in 2009.

“You can think roughly two, two and a half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with. That’s a good time frame for refresh,” said Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development in Microsoft’s Windows core operating system division, who spoke this week at the RSA Conference 2007, IDG News Services’ report claims.

Microsoft originally planned the code-named Longhorn operating system to include several radical changes to Windows, including a new file system and a reinvented user interface, but had to scrap the former due to the lack of time.

“We put Longhorn on the back burner for a while. 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,” Mr. Fathi said.

This time Microsoft, however, is cautious to tell about the new features of the code-named Vienna. The VP of Microsoft says the company is still unsure what it wants from its next-generation OS to be, however, it is highly likely that the company does not want to make promises it is unsure about.

“We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don’t know what it is. Maybe, it’s a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It’s too early for me to talk about it, but over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more,” Mr. Fathi indicated.