InternetNews.com is reporting that leaked internal Microsoft calendars show that the release of Windows 7 is slated for June of 2009, rather than sometime in 2010 as the company has publicly stated.

There are good reasons to think that this might be the case even though the company won't officially confirm it. After all, they can't very well officially confirm it and still hope to push Vista seriously (as their $300 million ad campaign promises to do)... they'd be hoist by their own vaporware if they did. All those pundits and analysts, such as myself, who have been urging businesses to hold off and consider skipping Vista in favor of 7 would have a light at the end of the tunnel to cling to, and the whole prospect of avoiding Vista entirely would be that much more realistic.

But Microsoft has to understand at this point that many companies are considering that avenue anyway, and that each month that passes without their providing a realistic upgrade path for those businesses increases the chances that they will look elsewhere (or that the SaaS market will improve sufficiently in the meantime that they will simply look for the cheapest and easiest way to get a browser in front of their employees and not care much about OS function at all). Shipping 7 early would be a win on many fronts; it would give the operating system a clean slate with buyers, allow the company to focus less on damage control and more on features, and present a more competent picture of Microsoft engineering than did the widely publicized and maligned trainwreck of the Vista development process.

I'm hoping for an early release of Windows 7 for all those reasons, but I expect the company to continue to keep it close to the chest, for once under-promising and over-delivering... or at least not looking like fools by promising a target date they can't deliver on.