Free the Windows 7 !
Brandon has a post on the Windows team blog
Windows 7 will be in stores beginning October 22nd.
I was talking a group of people a little while ago who said “In the stores in time for the Holiday season means what ? A reason margin before thanksgiving in the US ?” So this fits nicely with that enough time to stock on the shelves, sales people informed and so on. Working back from that you need at least a month, and ideally 6 weeks to 2 months to from “release” to “in stores”. We don’t have a fixed release date, because things can go wrong at the last minute, as Brandon says
Obviously, Release To Manufacturing (RTM) is an important milestone on the path to [General Availability]. We anticipate that we’ll be able to make the RTM code for Windows 7 available to our partners sometime in the 2nd half of July. We also expect to be able to make RTM code for Windows Server 2008 R2 available to our partners in this time frame as well.
So the server products will be out around the same time.
That’s also giving ourselves a decent margin for last minute problems. Ed Bott has brief post and has the decency not to say “I told you so”, because after a look at the Beta back in January he said it would release round in July. I’ve said if it wasn’t ready by August or September there would probably need to be another release candidate but if there we went from Beta to just one RC, then July seemed about right. People are going to ask “I’m on such and such a programme, will I be able to get it between RTM and October 22”. Such things will be clarified nearer the time.
With bing getting a great press, and Xbox showcasing project natal like this which can also do party pieces like this and this
I feel like next year could be a vintage one.
By the way, I rarely embed You tube in my posts, that should tell you I think the video above is a bit special.