I feel for CNET’s Inet Fried, who got an interview with Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky to talk about Windows 7, but got nothing of substance out of him, even though he is the right person to ask. I quite enjoyed this bit of circumlocution though. Sinofsky is talking about how Microsoft “re-plumbed” the graphics in Vista:

The team worked super hard with the partners in graphics to really do a great job, but the schedule challenges that we had, and the information disclosure weren’t consistent with the realities of the project, which made it all a much trickier end point when we got to the general availability in January.

Who are the “partners in graphics”? Sinofsky is talking about third-party vendors of graphics cards, mostly ATI, NVIDIA and Intel. What is the relevance of “information disclosure”? Sinofsky is talking about how the information delivered by Microsoft to these vendors was insufficiently accurate, complete or consistent for them to create robust drivers in time. What is a “trickier end point”? Well, problems like this driver error I guess – an earlier post which has just clocked up its 244th comment.

So now we are getting a few confessions about Vista, but that does not tell us much about Windows 7; except that there will be less re-plumbing and more high-level changes. Maybe.

If you are still curious about Windows 7, there are always the rumours about Ribbon, Jewel, and the new “markup based UI and a small, high performance, native code runtime” to chew on.