Happy Windows 7 Launch Day!

This is very exciting and has been long coming. I haven’t received my copy yet, so my test copy will have to do until it arrives.

Now that we are finally ready to put Vista behind us and embrace Windows 7, I can’t help but think what lies ahead in the Microsoft OS. How do you improve on Windows 7? When will we see the Start menu and Windows taskbar completely gone from the Microsoft OS and replaced with something else? Will 128-bit lead to anything spectacular besides more room for ram and quicker loading applications?

I was reading Everton’s article, 24 Years of Windows and was looking closely at the screenshots from previous versions of Windows and I realized that besides the days of 3.x, Windows has generally kept the same look and feel. I’m curious which version and what year it will be when I look at an OS and say, “Is that really Windows?” Are the days of Minority Report PC’s almost upon us? I have to imagine that touch-based PC’s will increase and graphics will become more detailed, smoother and more 3D-like. Resolutions will probably climb to heights previously thought unreachable. I know that we are in for some amazing surprises with future OS’s, but at this point, I can’t imagine where we go from here. Right here on windows7news.com, Mike has written about some of his wish list items in his article series Looking Forward to Windows 8 and it got me thinking about what we might possibly see as a follow up to Windows 7.

While Windows 7 is still an undiscovered country to millions of PC users, most of us reading this article are already reading sites like Windows8news.com and have been scouring the internet looking for legitimate screenshots of the future of Windows. I don’t know about other users, but I’ve been rejuvenated by the success of Windows 7 and look for Microsoft to raise the bar even higher.

I’m more into GUI than anything, so I am most looking forward to seeing where future OS’s take their interface. What are the features you have been looking forward to? Is there anything specific that Microsoft left out of the final Windows 7 code that you were hoping to see?