Though Redmond has been uncorking bottles of champaign lately for the release of Windows Vista, they certainly haven't stopped looking forward. The next two versions of Windows are already on the drawing board, and have been for some time. Their codenames are Fiji and Vienna (Vista's was Longhorn, if you recall), and they're the successors to the Windows throne according to a blog called Unnecessary. Fiji is planned as a "Second Edition" of Vista, which is intended to finally bring some of those promised Longhorn features that never materialized to Vista. Among them: More new UI features, a more powerful Sidebar, tighter Windows Live integration, more advanced speech recognition, WinFS (finally!) on top of NTFS, maybe a music-authoring program called Monaco, and more.

Vienna (formerly known as Blackcomb) is slated to be the next huge leap forward for Windows, "similar to the transition from OS 8-9 to OS X." Vienna will break application compatibility with previous versions of Windows to make room for a "newer, more flexible, richer and secure platform." Among the new features will be a completely overhauled interface ("No more explorer shells, and taskbars. No start menu. Probably no toolbars, or menus."), speech recognition as a "major input device," a new version of NTFS wrapped in WinFS ("No more drives, or files/folders location to worry about. File Management will be done through applications, which will automatically index and sort the files they support."), and more.

Ooh, that all sounds great. But take it with a grain of salt. Preferably the biggest one you can find. I would love to see all of these new features in the next versions of Windows, but Longhorn/Vista has taught me not to hold my breath. Don't get me wrong, I am optimistic about the future of Windows, and I love reading lists like this.. but let's not count our chickens before they're hatched.

[Via Engadget]