There’s more speculation today over the launch date of Windows 7. Uhm, folks, aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves? Think about it from the engineering perspective–we haven’t even seen a beta yet. This “marketing-and-business-focused” think is what got things into a pickle with Vista. Let’s not do it again. Sure it’s always a business decision as to when a product ships, but come on, there are tens of millions of people relying upon Windows, this isn’t a game where you can say “oops, my bad” if you make a huge release blunder. So stay calm and watch for the real tell-tell signs of a product launch.
First things first. A beta needs to make its way out into the wild. If there’s no widely available beta, then don’t spend too much time on thinking about release dates. The beta will reveal its secrets in time in terms of its readiness and so on.
Second, we have little idea how much Microsoft is adding/augmenting Vista, if anything. Let’s all wait and see what the official word is.
Till then, no word at all means either of two things: 1) Windows 7 isn’t ready any time soon or 2) the changes to Windows 7 aren’t going to be that great so a condensed schedule will work fine. Either way, it means we’ll have an appropriate amount of time to adjust.
Now for me, I hope that Microsoft does a good job of communicating with developers what’s going to be forthcoming in Windows 7 if there are going to be substantial changes. Surprises are fine for the breaking-news-oriented media, but for people like me that like to write leading edge code, well, not so much.
Of course, we’ll all adjust no matter how Windows 7 is launched–whether it’s tomorrow or 2 years from now. The sun will rise, the world will go on. It’s just software.
One thing I will say is that in terms of product delivery and communicating roadmaps within Microsoft, Scott Guthrie’s .NET and tools team is showing how it’s done. Quite impressive–especially from a C#/ASP.NET perspective. (C++, well not so much, but that’s another story.) I’m not so sure if it would be a wise move to manage Windows the way .NET is, however, in terms of the web side, it sure looks to me like if Scott Guthrie has anything to do with it, that Microsoft’s forthcoming web-based dev tools are going to be timely, valuable, and impressive. I’m giving them a 3 1/2 out of 4 stars right now in terms of execution.
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