Microsoft ponders Windows successor

Multicore processors will be part of it

A successor to the Windows operating system, while still very much in the theoretical stage, is expected to better leverage multicore processors, for starters, a Microsoft official says.

Speaking at the recent Venture Forum conference in San Jose, Bryan Barnett, a programme manager for external research programs in the Microsoft Research group, said multicore architectures are of particular interest when weighing what to put in future operating systems at the company.

"Taking full advantage of the processing power that those multicore architectures potentially make available requires operating systems and development tools that don't exist largely today," Barnett says.

Windows can currently run on multicore processors, but is not fully optimised for them, Barnett says. "It's not a question of just running on a multicore architecture. It's a question of what do you do to fully exploit the capabilities there," he says.

There is no timetable for a Windows successor right now and while early work on this effort has not yet been organised, there are five or six small projects afoot in various places throughout the company, Barnett says.

Finding a DOS successor in the early 1990s seemed a simpler task, he says. "Somehow, it was easier when the company was smaller a long time ago.

"Merely having size and resources isn't necessarily in this instance an advantage."

For now, Microsoft plans to release its next major version of Windows, Windows Vista, next year.