The news came at the bottom of a post commemorating Windows 7's one-year anniversary and suggests a substantially later deployment date than the one detailed in a leaked slide deck about the forthcoming product earlier this year.
According to the slide deck, the next version of Windows should include a Windows App Store similar to the one Apple unveiled for Mac last week, logins via facial recognition and faster boot-up times. It also cited early 2011 as the intended launch date.
Given that Apple will at minimum release its new Mac OS X Lion operating system by that time, it seems that Windows 8 will have to develop some impressive features to stay competitive.
Yet a three-year gap between operating systems is nothing new for Microsoft. The Seattle-based company has historically taken much more time to develop and deploy new versions of its desktop operating system than Apple. Windows 7 was released a year ago this month, approximately two and a half years after Windows Vista became available to most consumers. There was a five-year gap between Windows XP and Vista, a delay so painful that CEO Steve Ballmer publicly pledged that the company would never again allow such a long period to elapse between releases.