RSSWindow 7 coming early, as expected
It's usually a vendor that spills the beans, and in this case it seems to be Acer that is the culprit. Bobby Watkins of Acer UK is cited in this Pocket-lint story as saying, "23rd October is the date the Windows 7 will be available." The date is well ahead of the official early 2010 release that Microsoft continues to identify as its own target, but a bit behind my own guess of late summer release.
Although Microsoft appears to be playing coy for the best of reasons, trying to ensure a launch as smooth this time around as Vista's was rocky, I think they might be better served by kicking the operating system gold masters out the door as soon as possible. While the muddled consumer market will adopt 7 in the same measures as it did Vista, largely with the purchase of new machines (save those few poor frustrated souls who view 7 as the salvation to their time in Vista-purgatory), it is becoming less and less clear that corporate IT shops will flock to 7 as a savior. Most who dodged Vista had excellent experiences running XP in the meantime, and that being the case, might not find any compelling reasons to rush their upgrades until the 2014 EOL date on that product. If you were getting by on extended support thus far, the logic might go, and are almost certain to be relying on it for a year or more even after 7 is released (as that is the span of time typically exercised between release and major corporate roll-out), why not stretch it even further? This should keep the bean counters happy in a time of tightening corporate pocketbooks, and it hedges one's bets that, by 2014, a substantial portion of one's application inventory may be OS-independent anyway. Won't you feel silly having sunk capital into maintenance-intensive desktops when it turns out that all anyone uses is the browser? It might be worth a gold star on the CIOs progress report to wait around up in the stands a bit before venturing into the arena, just to see how it is looking once the dust settles in a couple of years.
If that logic holds for many businesses, then the last thing Microsoft should do is give them more time to mull it over. The sooner 7 is out, the sooner organizations will be making decisions over whether or not to adopt it. Although it is an artificial deadline, it's an operative one all the same, and the default reaction right now, even among the uncertain, might well be to commit. Given another six months, who can say?
