From my ignorant position as an outsider, I have three predictions for the super secret features that will be unveiled at WWDC 2007. Unfortunately one of them has just been stolen before I could make it. Sun's Jonathon Schwartz announced today that ZFS will be the default file system in Leopard. This is very good news. ZFS provides enormous advantages in flexibility, manageability and reliability over current file systems.

I better get the other two out before they get leaked as well:

OS-Level support for Windows NT applications
We already know that Apple is shying away from virtualization. But why is that? Because it still requires copies of Windows and all the problems that that entails. Much better is to run the applications directly, like WINE does. The implementation would include sandboxing so that Apple can provide a completely secure environment for running Windows apps. Apple could have been working secretly on this for many years and polishing it to perfection. It would provide the best upgrade path for companies who don't want Vista (almost all of them) and draw many more people from the Windows world.

A New Kernel
Mach has its problems and has needed a lot of work to make it granular enough to provide the performance needed by Mac OS X. So my third prediction is that Mach is out and something else is in. Be has shown us that a correctly-written kernel can provide excellent media, and real-time performance, so why would Apple not be doing this? It won't be Linux. My guess is that it will either be home-grown or something few people have heard of.

I am hoping that I will do better than my MacWorld 2007 predictions -- all wrong.

[Update: All wrong again. But then we've not seen the whole of Leopard, so I still could be right]

Tags: WWDC, Wild Guesses, ZFS, Microsoft, Apple