Windows 7 arriving "sometime in the next year" says Gates, "The hell it is" says the rest of Microsoft
A slightly off-hand comment from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates managed to set the blogosphere alight with a wave of excited speculation over the weekend. Answering a question about Vista, Gates told the audience at the annual meeting in Miami of the Inter-American Development Bank on Friday:
“Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version [of Windows].” Gasp, ZOMFG, etc.
Taken at face value, you can see why there was an explosion of excitement (perhaps that was the real intention all along). But are we talking about a completed, commercial version? Will it really be arriving in the early part of 2009? Err, no it won’t, and if it did, there would be even more irate Vista users out there wondering why their product was getting rendered obsolete so damned quickly.
Fortunately, another Microsoft representative stepped in soon afterwards to confirm that Windows 7 actually would not be anywhere near available ‘in the next year’ – it might be at some kind of alpha or beta testing stage if it’s lucky, but it certainly won’t be available to buy before, oooh, January 2010.
Microsoft (via CNET)
Related posts: XP retired by June | Vista SP1 hacked
