One stone-cold fact about Windows 7 is that we need more stone-cold facts in order to understand the new operating system that is likely to arrive in early 2010.
The company has said some of those facts will come in late October and early November during two of its major conferences -- the Professional Developers Conference (Oct. 27-30) and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (Nov. 5-7).
What is known beyond the Windows 7 code name is that Microsoft is building the operating system on the Windows Vista code base in order to avoid the sort of application-compatibility problems that plagued Vista early in its release. The new interface will feature the Ribbon toolbar throughout, and the server version will add the much-anticipated live migration feature to the virtualization capabilities.