According to the executive in charge of building the product's core components, the software giant will launch their next operating system in 2009. It will take about two-and-a-half years time to deliver the successor to Vista, and hopefully Microsoft will introduce it before the end of 2009. At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division said, "We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile, then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release."

He didn't confirm the name "Vienna" but said that it will definitely feature some cool features. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers."
"It's too early for me to talk about it," he added. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

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