Seven won't have enough time for that I think, Windows 8 comes out in 3 years, that means the first beta will be surely comes out end 2010.
Who knows, maybe the next Windows will be another Vista, M$ seem to be a little hit and miss. I wouldn't be surprised if M$ did a lot of delaying too.
I understand what you have written but what might just happen is whilst some people consider W7 to be an improvement over Vista others might not wish to do absolutely anything at all as XP more than fulfils their needs. Are you aware of the total costs incurred of rolling out a new OS, even across a small or medium sized business, when there is very little benefit to be seen.? Especially in these cost conscious saving times we are in within the IT world. I come across such businesses often and find that they are quite happy, or in some cases oblivious, to what they are running as an OS as that is merely a conduit to give them the packages they need. The hardware they are using, at times, even W7 would struggle with, but XP runs nicely. Defining one OS as being "better" than another is not only subjective but difficult as the context in which it is being judged is different for each persons / businesses needs.
at present I am dual booting both XP and Win7 .... I have been a huge fan of XP since sp3 and when tweaked looks and performs very well .... giving full control, and I feel excellent compatibility. Although I agree, that Win 7 is the future, and it already shows great promise, I am not quite ready to switch over from Xp at this time ... because although no "showstopper" faults with Win 7, I think I will reserve final judgement for another day. Win7 has a habit of blocking programs from fully installing...with "error 1317"...and various others... such and such can't install shortcut to path ...please check access rights .... I take ownership ...install progresses.....then same again.....check access to next path ...... and that's with UAC disabled ... and my fingers sore right clicking "Take Ownership" ..... lol. Often laggy deleting files.....and refreshing ... maybe some updates later on, will make this a "can't live without o/s" ... but for now, I prefer XP.
As far as i know Windows 8 will be released bot only That said, no more a 32bit OS Windows 7 is the latest 32bits.
it has been speculated by MS for a long time that Windows 7 will be the last client OS in 32-bits. There aren't any press releases or anything like I said just speculation.
DX9c will be here for years to come because DX10 was a major flop imo.DX10 is about 30-50% slower but virtually no better eyecandy. 10.1 fixed the performance a little with AA but still.Hopefully DX11 will be what DX10 should have been. This has not been confirmed.MS is investigating x64 only scenario with developers for Win8.My opinion is that Win8 will still ship in both x86 and x64 variants.I expect it to be the last to support x86 and Win9(circa ~2015) will be x64 only
This is all speculation, but from what first versions of Office 2010 look like (the x64 bits) it would point that MS is heading definitely in the x64 direction which is IMHO actually a very wise decision (the times when computers used less than 3GB of RAM are all over).
I've noticed that every new windows version simply digs the "critical error handler" hole a little deeper, and the developers are forced to pile on more and more crap to compensate. I am a long time developer, and long ago learned that Microsoft is too stingy to publish what developers need to write efficient apps. Mankind was storing data iconographicaly 5 thousand years ago, then languages got more efficient, then Bill Gates comes along and offers a U.I. using Icons and sets language back 2000 years! Experts know that simple Hot Keys and Pie Menus are Way faster and efficient, but the public has into this "Computer as art object" phase. I mean, just look at us! We sit and pay athletes to play our games for us, we pay people to have sex for us as, again we sit and watch! I could go on and on! Maybe everyone should get out of this voyeristic Slumber and start actual-ly thinking about how efficient our tools are, and not how much they sparkle! Competition is the poison that Marx conjured up in order to keep the Wests' mind off of how badly their government was abusing them! I mean, he warned us before hand, and we Still fell for it! The USSA is the Last True Communist nation on earth!
On my own particular systems anyway, XP tends to have the slightly faster raw CPU performance. It's as with any newer build of Windows, it's doing more things in the background, of course it has a little less time to run the synthetic benchmark. Or as another example, I can have a BSD kernel doing absolutely nothing which clobbers Geekbench vs Windows.. it's just not doing anything where Windows has a lot going on. No surprises, of course the BSD kernel is going to get a better score. XP's the same way, it's doing a lot less in the background. Gaming I've noticed a difference in mayyyyybe a few FPS at best in a DirectX 9 game, totally a non-issue for me, can't even see it. 148 vs 150? You won't even notice. DX10 games of course run slower; more eyecandy takes more work. But where 7 really shines is that it's capable of doing more at the same time without getting sluggish, where XP's multitasking is rather poor. Plus it handles resources a lot better than XP. Same hardware, same software minus the OS, I find my system just running so much more smoothly under 7 where I'll be stuck waiting for XP to load things or juggle its resources around.