Microsoft News Tracker

The received wisdom from Microsoft is that Windows 7 is set for a January, 2010 release, but Andy Patrizio at InternetNews has some buzz that it might be much earlier:

Publicly, Microsoft has said Windows 7, the successor operating system to the firm’s much maligned Windows Vista, will not ship until early 2010, but its internal calendar has June 3, 2009 as the planned release date, InternetNews.com has learned.

Also, Microsoft will use its Professional Developer’s Conference in late October as the launch platform for the first public beta of Windows 7. Microsoft plans to release the first beta on October 27, the first day of the show, when Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will be the keynote speaker.

Heck, why not? Windows 7 seems to be merely a cleaned up version of Vista, so why should it take Microsoft any longer than June 2009 to deliver it? The most annoying Microsoft problem in Vista was the User Access Control  (UAC) prompts which Microsoft, in a fit of madness, implemented to purposely annoy end users and that’s easy to turn off as any perceptive Vista user has already discovered.

On the other hand, the really significant problems with Vista are with the availability (or lack thereof) of partner device drivers. Only time really cures or at least softens that ill, so longer might well be better.