http://www.thinknext.net/archives/2268

The website is legitimate, beacuse it's been posting these pictures ever since Milestone 1, with visible progress. However, Microsoft's unlimited resources and thousands of programmers have yet to produce anything different from Vista. The rumours are for a beta in December, and if this is the progress they've made since late 2006 then it won't change too much from this to final. And they'll sell it for full price.

All they've managed to do is screw up the UI and make it unfamiliar to their core customers (i.e. people who don't really know how to use a computer). They've done Paint and Wordpad with an Office 2007 ribbon. What does that achieve beyond forcing companies to retrain staff?

The only truly new feature I can see is that you can have widgets on your desktop instead of the sidebar. That's been in KDE for a year now.

Microsoft, if we have to buy your OS, can you please make it worth the money to upgrade?

I don't know if I buy this man...a dude with a mac can easily make these screenshots. :)

XP lives on for another 4 years.. lol

Looks like VISTA? lol.. XP FTW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No faker would seriously redesign Calculator's UI (WTF?). Only a company of Microsoft's incompetence would do that. A faker would create new applications and features to generate interest.

I like the Vista UI and find a lot of tasks easier to accomplish than on XP. Especially system tasks in the control panel. Setting up networking/file sharing/print sharing is a breeze compared to what it was with XP. I don't get the hatred towards that. What I do feel are legitimate concerns are the resources it uses and the driver problems (which are becoming less and less of a problem as time goes on). If Windows 7 can improve on that then I think it would be a worthy upgrade IMO.

Looks very similar to Windows Vista, who knows what changes they will make between now to it's release.

I love Vista's GUI, but i would like to see a significant change between different Operating Systems.

What does M$ have against menus? It's bad enough that I had to download a third-party addon to add them to Office 2007 because the ribbon system sucks, now they're adding it to WordPad and Paint? What's next, ribbons for Notepad and Character Map? Other than that, I don't have Vista, but it doesn't look too different to what I've seen from it.

They've said that Windows 7 will be released 3 years after Vista. Based on what Microsoft usually does, they have a year or more of beta testing with no new features (after all, a billion+ people will use it). That would put the feature freeze date at the end of 2008. If those screenshots are what they've done since late 2006, they can't be making that many more significant changes.

Of course, the theme is one of the last things to be added. It'll still look amazingly like Vista though.

They could've atleast made it look different from vista.