It's always easiest to notice new information which tends to support your existing beliefs or which somehow validates prior decisions or recommendations, and maybe that is why I am seeing so many things these days that make me happy to have recommended to most clients that they skip implementing Windows Vista in favor of waiting for a good look at Windows 7. But when even Vista's biggest cheerleader, Steve Ballmer, publicly acknowledges the viability of the position, I get warm fuzzies (and clients who will call again when they need advice).

But it's not just Ballmer admitting that Vista could be better and promising that 7 will be that better product. It's also what we're hearing now from the 7 team. "Cutting is shipping" is music to my ears. Larry Osterman's post on the Engineering Windows 7 weblog not only presents a picture of a much more rational and productive software engineering approach than that which lead to Vista (more on that in a future post) but also contains some subtle hints that perhaps Mary Jo Foley's contention that 7 is much closer to shipping than either Microsoft will acknowledge or people will credit is correct. It's not much, perhaps, but Osterman doesn't talk about 7 as if it's a going concern, programming-wise... his post is peppered with the past tense: "I worked" and the "crew delivered" rather than the "we're working" you might expect. This is admittedly pretty thin; maybe Osterman personally has moved on, or perhaps his team's particular features are code complete, or maybe the mindset is simply such that the team considers the fix and polish phase as if the product is already in the can. But I think that taken together with other clues it paints a picture of a product which is solid and on the verge of release.

This isn't to say that it's coming out in time for Christmas; I'm sure a robust beta phase is still ahead of us, and no doubt plenty of polish will go into it before the scheduled release in January 2010, but I believe that the team will have the option of releasing a finished product just about any time they feel like doing so in 2009. And it's nice to have that option, even if they don't choose to exercise it for marketing or other reasons. So... if you're still considering upgrades, hold on a little longer... you may have more options yourself much sooner than you think.