Windows 7 to Ship in October. Probably. Unless It's January.
By David Worthington | Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I’ve confirmed a report by Bloomberg news report that Microsoft plans to ship Windows 7 by October. Microsoft has also worked out a contingency plan for a secondary launch date in the event that the European Commission takes action, a well-placed source at Microsoft told me.
Ray Chen, president at Taipei-based Compal Electronics, made the disclosure at an investors’ conference at the company’s headquarters today. He also projected that Windows 7’s release could help reinvigorate sagging PCs sales amid the global economic downturn. Chen is positioned to know: Compal produces laptops for big-name brands including Acer and Hewlett-Packard.
A source at Microsoft told me that Chen is right on the money. The October timetable also meshes with the unofficial word that I have been hearing for weeks. Should the EU take action, Microsoft will push the release back to January, mirroring Windows Vista. OEMs have been asked to move forward as if October is the date regardless of what happens in the courts.
Indeed, Microsoft appears to be on track with its new operating system, and is nearly ready to begin updating its beta release to solicit more feedback from testers.
Windows 7 builds on the plumbing that was laid by Windows Vista. Application and hardware compatibility issues should not involve anywhere near the hassles that the XP-to-Vistra transition caused, because Windows 7 is not a dramatic departure from Vista. Additionally, Microsoft had already completed work for application developers in October before it even issued the first beta.
Windows Vista also got off to a rocky start in part because it was released in January–about the worst possible time for a new OS to debut. But the European Union willing, and unless there’a some sort of unanticipated problem, expect Windows 7 to be on store shelves and preinstalled on new PCs for the holidays.
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February 26th, 2009 at 10:00 am[…] Windows 7 to Ship in October. Probably. Unless It’s January. (technologizer.com) […]
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February 26th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Yes, I think this timeline is also correct as it will coincide with their next Quarterly earnings report….
February 28th, 2009 at 9:32 am
WOW user interface tweaks! Improving things that no one cares about has become Microsoft’s primary mission over the past 7 years! MS is operating in a unique vacuum, spending millions on manhours developing features that add nothing substantive to the product.
… talk about lost focus. Yeeesh.
February 28th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Microsoft does not understand that not providing a upgrade path for the hundreds of millions of non- Vista users shuts out Windows 7 no matter how good. Although the company I work for has but 3 servers and 60 clients we already are migrating to Linux to replace all Microsoft products. This was forced upon us.
February 28th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Let’s hope Microsoft won’t delay this because this may mean the end of Windows
March 1st, 2009 at 9:23 am
@Jerry That is really not a fair observation. Substantial work went into Windows Vista under the hood to re-write networking and to make Windows more secure through the Security Development Lifecycle process. The number of vulnerabilities has dropped off significantly.
March 1st, 2009 at 9:26 am
@frank Most enterprises are still running XP on their desktops, but a significant number are in the process of migrating to Vista. The upgrade path from XP to 7 is important, but it appears that enterprises are not going to skip a generation.
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:33 am
David
The company I work for in the Ship building business did a lot of research before deciding to go Linux. We spoke to others in our business and saw the cost of going to Vista just to install Windows 7 to great.
A $100,000 upgrade for a small system was not in our business plan.
April 24th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Frank,
For most companies,including ones like yours with 60 computers, upgrading to Vista just to upgrade to Win7 is NOT required and SHOULDN’T be done. In fact, upgrading from one OS to another is generally not a good idea. The better plan is to back up the user state, wipe the existing hard drive clean, install the new OS, and restore the user state. By doing this, there is no upgrade issue and you don’t have to spend umteen thousand for an OS you won’t use. That being said, I would still get a few copies of Vista (eval copies are free and work well for this purpose) to test mission critical applications and hardware. Since Vista and Win7 use the same driver model and share a similar kernal, most devices and apps that work in Vista will work in Win7, and this provides you with a low cost test bed to investigate whether moving to Win7 is feasable in the short-term, and if not what steps you need to take to be ready in the longer term.
If it helps, I deploy OSes for a living, have more than a dozen years doing this exact thing, and have been through (and will go through) many more of these exact scenarios than I can count for companies large and small. If your company follows this high-level blueprint, you’ll be able to make good decisions regarding your upgrade strategy without having to break the bank and with a minimum of surprises.
Good luck, and God bless!
April 24th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Jerry,
Have you worked with Win7? If you haven’t, then you know not from whence you speak. I have been using it for more than two months, and am in fact typing from a Win7 box for this post. I have to say that it is the most stable, quickest, smallest footprint platform I have seen in a long while. Before you make a statement about XP being smaller and quicker, let me say that you’re right, but when XP forst burst on the scene, it was seen as a pig compared to Win2k. People tend to forget that back when XP made it debut, 256MB of RAM was normal, and XP had some issues running in that space. CPU situations weren’t much better, either. It took a while for the hardware to really outpace the OS, and the same will happen here. The difference is that Win7 runs comfortably on netbooks, where Vista would really choke, and that’s about a lowest common denominator as it gets in today’s PC society.
Bottom line is that before you call Win7 just window dressing, do some real research, or better yet, find yourself a copy and see for yourself. If you have seen and used it and still think it’s just, “user interface tweaks!” and, “Improving things that no one cares about” then I truly apologize, but you will have missed the boat on this OS entirely.
Good luck, and God bless.
July 2nd, 2011 at 3:20 pm
.) You made some decent points there. I looked on the internet for the issue and found most individuals will go along with with your website.
December 17th, 2011 at 10:05 am
CPU situations weren't much better, either. It took a while for the hardware to really outpace the OS, and the same will happen here. The difference is that Win7 runs comfortably on netbooks, where Vista would really choke, and that's about a lowest common denominator as it gets in today's PC society.
Nautica
January 26th, 2012 at 12:27 pm
WOW user interface tweaks! Improving things that no one cares about has become Microsoft's primary mission over the past 7 years! MS is operating in a unique vacuum, spending millions on manhours developing features that add nothing substantive to the product.
Timeshare scam