According to a job posting on Microsoft’s career site, Windows 8 planning and preparation is currently taking place.
The job posting, spotted by enthusiast site CodenameWindows, hints at third-party application updating, updating virtual machines while they’re turned off and delivering full applications, among others.
Microsoft admits in the posting that updating virtual machines whilst they are off “turns out this is pretty hard!.” The job is for a role on the Windows Update Client team, responsible for delivering software updates to over 600 million machines.
It reads:
SDE II(701629 -External)
Job Category: Software Engineering: Development
Location: United States, WA, Redmond
Job ID: 701629 7857
Division: Server & Tools BusinessThis is a great time to join us. Our team owns the Windows Update Client and our code delivers software and updates to over 600 million computers. We just finished up work on Windows 7, and are pushing forth on Windows 8 planning and preparation. There are opportunities to work on a number of hard problems, including third-party application updating, updating virtual machines while they’re turned off (turns out this is pretty hard!), and delivering full applications, among others. To help us charge full steam on these fronts, we are looking for skilled and passionate software engineers.
As part of this team, you will help shape Windows 8. Components of our code include a core agent that runs as an NT service, an API layer and a UI application. We talk to the update servers using web services and we have special protocols in place to deal with the massive scale of the system.
Nice to see that the planning has begun..
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All Comments
y should we develop a new os without fixing the bugs on the previous versions?
I think it sucks that Microsoft puts out Windows 7 and everyone buys it, now we have to pay for Windows 8, to me this is a make money thing they have going…they said Windows 7 was top of the line OS…now they come up with another windows program and wants everyone to run out and pay for it again..is this their way of getting rich faster and getting us to buy their products when we went and spent alot on Windows 7… Microsoft is being unfair to make us pay for Windows over again
The answer to both the comments below is simple. Its what the customer wants. I sympathies with both of you and see where you are coming from, but Microsoft has learned a lot since vista, windows xp was their leading os for far too long, they are now adapting to a 3-4 year release cycle. Yes it is partially designed to make money, but also to keep up with the competition, whoever delivers the best product stays on top, it would be a foolish mistake by Microsoft to wait another 6 years to release the next version of windows. Its almost exactly the same what apple does with their iPhone and iPads, they all have a 1 year release cycle, and diehard apple fans buy their new shiny iphones and ipads every year because the previous model seems obsolete to them, and none seems to criticize apple.
At the end of the day, nobody is forcing you to upgrade if you dont want to spend the money, I always pre-order my version of windows saving myself quite a lot of money (at least with windows 7:D).