The chairman of Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates, said at a news-conference that the world’s largest maker of software is on-track to release its next-generation operating system (OS) sometime in 2009. Certain indirect claims of Microsoft confirm this timeframe, which was already once named as the deadline for what is known as Windows 7, but then the company announced different schedules for code-named Vienna OS.

“Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version [of Windows operating system. I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways,” said Bill Gates at a conference of Inter-American Development Bank, reports Cnet News.com.

Also on Thursday Microsoft said that it would continue to offer its Windows XP Home operating system for low cost computers until mid-2010 or “one year after general availability of the next version of Windows”. The claim implies that Microsoft does plan to release its Windows 7 in mid-2009, a little more than a year from now.

Early in 2007 the company indicated that it would replace Windows Vista in two or two and a half years from them. However, already in mid-2007 the world’s largest software firm said that it would take it three years to create the new code-named Vienna operating system, which official name is projected to be Windows 7. In Janury, 2008, the world’s largest software developer implied that the new version of Windows was due in 2011.

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 – Windows 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. With a new consumer OS ready in mid-2009 the software giant will be back to its usual pace of operating systems introduction.