The new Windows version, previously known as "Vienna," will now simply be called "7," obviously referring that the OS is the 7.0 offspring of the NT family. Although not much has been really said about this new Windows 7, a lot of speculation does seem to fly around it.

For one thing, because of the delay of Windows Vista, some companies might not be so eager to sign in on it. Some companies buy software assurance licenses from Microsoft, which gives them free upgrades when the new version of the platform comes out.

A recent survey by Forrester Research Inc. however, reveals that about a quarter of companies currently subscribed to the service might pull out. If subscribers to the Software Assurance program do pull out, it would be a blow to Microsoft seeing as it earned them US$ 4 billion in the first quarter of this year.

Another is the speculations surrounding on what the new Windows 7 actually does. In an interview by Newsweek, Bill Gates gives us what might be a look into the new OS:

... Right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.