Quote:
Originally Posted by Ferra
Can someone tell me why are they coming out with a new window when Vista has only been out for 2 years??
I thought most OS have a cycle life of 5 - 7 years??
|
From release to end of support is about 5-10 years but release dates between OS's is about 2-3 years
The following is from Wikipedia, I've cut out the OS's that home users wouldn't have like NT and 2000. There was a period where MS tried splitting Windows into 2 flavours, one for home and one for business. With Windows XP, they merged the two back together using the NT core.
1985 Windows 1.01
1987 Windows 2.03
1989 Windows 2.11
1990 Windows 3.0
1992 Windows 3.1x
1995 Windows 95
1998 Windows 98
2000 Windows Me
2001 Windows XP
2007 Windows Vista
2009 (planned) Windows 7
The period between XP and Vista was so great because it was almost completely rewritten from scratch rather than making changes to the core and releasing a new version.
The 2-3 year product cycle goes for other OS's as well. About 6 months after Leopard was released, Apple already announced Snow Leopard. In Fact, in a 7 year period, Apple released OSX 10.0 to 10.5. That's almost one per year, Cheetah and Puma were released in the same year 6 months apart.