Ben Fathi, VP of Development in Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division, says that the next version of Windows (which may or may not be codenamed “Vienna”) is coming at the close of 2009. Fathi’s comments came at last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, but the real story isn’t the shipping target that the mainstream newswires are fixating on. We all know that those dates are meaningless.

Instead, Fathi’s hint at what Microsoft has planned for the future is far more juicy. “We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don’t know what it is,” Fathi said according to InfoWorld. “Maybe it’s a new user interface paradigm for consumers.”

Full article: Ars Technica