There is no denying that the initial news about Windows 7, Vista’s successor, weren’t especially great for Microsoft. Vista is by far not as successful as Microsoft would have hoped and Windows 7 will have to carry the company until a completely new operating system, speculated to be code-named Midori, will be available. So, will Windows 7 be another Vista? Will it lag behind OS X Snow Leopard? Is multi-touch UI really as great as Microsoft claims it will be?

It seems that Microsoft is now confident enough to offer a sneak peek at the new Windows features at its upcoming developer and hardware conferences in October and November. It even set up an official Windows 7 blog on which senior engineers promise to discuss the operating system with users. It is a different approach than what the company took with Vista and appears that the wave of Vista criticism has had an impact.

Microsoft said that it will publicly reveal details and "in-depth technical information" about Windows 7 to developers attending its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) set to take place from October 26-29 and at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) scheduled for November 5-7.

Writing on the new Windows 7 blog, Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan, senior engineering team leaders, pledged to document the pace of development and offer a peak at Windows 7 features in the works from time to time. "With this blog we're opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7," the company wrote. "We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog."

It is quite apparent that Microsoft will be gauging early interest for the yet-to-be-revealed Windows 7 features and establish a measure to control or at least balance the news flow about Windows 7. Actual information coming out of this blog may actually be not as comprehensive as Windows might expect, as the authors said they will "not set expectations around the release that end up disappointing," like "features that don't make it, claims that don't stick, or support we don't provide."

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