Ed Bott over at ZDNet seems fairly confident that Windows 7 is scheduled for a release before August 1st, 2009. This comes from a single line in the Beta release notes that says,
When the Beta expires on August 1, 2009, you’ll need to reinstall a released version of Windows to keep using your computer.
While this is purely speculation, I would definitely support such an early release date, but only if it was guaranteed to be stable, secure, and able to encourage adoption amongst customers. If it achieves that, at least I will still have a job for a while yet, and thankfully be able to skip past Vista.
I’m fairly sure that there isn’t an IT website out there that doesn’t expect the release date of win 7 to be about June/July.
And from what I’m reading, the beta version of Win 7 is the most stable beta that has been released.
Hopefully by then I’ll have a job which can pay for a decent PC which I could put win 7 on.
In a way I suppose it ties in at about the right time, since Microsoft wants to abandon XP in about 3-4 months.
No way people are going to jump onto Vista for a year if they know Windows 7 is in the works.