Windows 7 launch date 'œsort-of' revealed

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 12 May 2009 21:40

Opinion and Analysis

Although Microsoft has been officially saying that Windows 7 would launch “3 years” after the general availability of its predecessor, Windows Vista, thus signifying a January 2010 release timeframe, Microsoft has now announced it expects Windows 7 to launch before 2009’s “holiday season” in a move that has been long expected.

With Windows 7 getting much better press and feedback than Windows Vista at this stage of its development cycle, and with the Windows 7 “Release Candidate” finally available, some questions have remained unanswered.

Chief among these is exactly how much Microsoft will charge consumers and businesses for a copy of Windows 7, with a range of tech pundits, bloggers and commentators urging Microsoft to be very realistic in its pricing decisions in the face of the global economic crisis, free versions of ever better Linux distros such as Ubuntu 9.04 and many others, and the ever growing popularity of the Mac.

Another big question is exactly when Windows 7 will actually launch. Given that Vista was officially launched in the January 2007 timeframe, after the lucrative end-of-year Christmas/holiday shopping season, a similar timeframe for Windows 7 seemed unlikely precisely because launching after Christmas is a monumentally stupid thing to do.

As Linux and Mac lovers will readily note, Microsoft is prone to doing incredibly stupid things on a regular basis, so a January 2010 release date for Windows 7, had that actually been the case, would have been yet another disappointment.

However, in what has clearly been one of the worst-kept secrets of all time, there was no way Microsoft would repeat the delayed Vista launch mistake a second time if it could avoid it, what with its proclamations that “quality” is the order of the day with Windows 7 and its clear desire to, for once, “under promise”, and “over deliver” – or at least, deliver that perception.

Given that perception is a very powerful thing, Microsoft hadn’t officially shifted from its “Jan 2010” release mantra for quite some time, for fear that some stuff-up would force Microsoft to release Windows 7 later than it has internally been planning.

Until now, that is.

In a press release celebrating various announcements at its North American “Tech Ed 2009” conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft’s Senior VP of Windows Business, Bill Veghte, has finally revealed Microsoft’s intentions to release Windows 7 in 2009 after all.

But do we have an actual release date? No, not specifically – just a promise to release it “in time for the holiday shopping season”.

More details on page 2 – please read on!