RSSWindows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 to ship before the holidays
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 11, 2009, 2:19 PM
Microsoft's Windows Business Senior Vice President Bill Veghte delivered what may very well have been one of the more disappointing keynote addresses to TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles this morning, judging not only in terms of features but in pure speech quality. But one hour and fifteen minutes into the address, he answered the key question he called one of two "elephants in the room:"
"When are we going to ship? This is a question that I get a lot," Veghte said. "We're going for holiday and we're tracking very, very well for it."
The sentence triggered some audible murmuring in the audience, probably as attendees wondered just which holiday he was talking about. Assuming it's Christmas as the ship date for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (expected to be released in tandem), the news may very well have come as a disappointment to software partners in the audience who had been hoping for a faster ramp -- at least October -- to enable them time to get their own products and upgrades ready in time for what will be critical holiday sales this season.
Veghte also invoked the code-phrase "tracking well," which Vista veterans will recall Microsoft's marketers used in 2006 to camouflage the product's many delays -- for instance, saying the product is "tracking well for January" or "on track for January" instead of "delayed until January."
Minutes after Veghte made the announcement, Microsoft elaborated on Veghte's statement to the press: "Microsoft is announcing that the next version of its client operating system, Windows 7, will be available to customers in time for the holiday shopping season."
Though press sources had been instructed to expect Windows Mobile 6.5 related news during the keynote this morning, it was apparently not to be. There was clearly time to have mentioned WM 6.5, that Veghte consumed "introducing" features of Windows 7 that most everyone in the audience had already seen, such as the taskbar. In what appeared to be a transparent effort to fill space prior to Mark Russinovich's initial demonstration (the real reason why most attendees came to the keynote anyway), Veghte conjured metaphors on the fly. At one point, referring to four items in a slide that he realized too late were not the company's "four pillars," he said, "We have a lot in those buckets. And those areas are great. And we hear that those areas are not enough."
Russinovich saved the day, however, with some demos of Windows 7 features that not even testers during the last week had found yet, including tweaks to the AppLocker feature introduced during the first beta cycle. That feature enables group policy to manage what kind or class of application is allowed to run on client systems.
Veghte's other "elephant in the room" concerned application compatibility, but by the time he had addressed it, Russinovich had already dismissed it with adept demonstrations of features such as App-V -- a way to push installed applications from servers to clients using a virtualization envelope.
Did anyone say how many Bundles there coming out with yet? or the price for each one yet?
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|http://www.networkworld.....html?fsrc=netflash-rss
"Microsoft Monday said users testing Vista should abandon that effort for the Windows 7 RC candidate."
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|Sound advice... anyone ramping up for deployment of Vista should very seriously consider switching their plan to Win7. The tools are better, the compatibility is better, and the performance is better.
Win7 is only mere months away now. Deploying Vista at this date would be an odd choice seeing as how the new OS will be out very likely before they've even completed the Vista migration. Best bet might indeed be to hold off and use their Vista testing experience to make for a win7 migration.
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|"the compatibility is better, and the performance is better..."
uh, what? it's not even out yet, so we don't know the compatibility.
And I'd like to see a single benchmark that shows performance is >5% better than Vista Post SP1.
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|well, regardless what benchmarks may say ... a 5-10% increase, it does feel faster and thats what matters
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|That doesn't matter. You are working with a fresh build, and you have subjective bias. Of course it feels faster.
Go back to Windows Vista, after SP1, and that'll feel fast also. Install XP SP3. W2K SP4. Am I getting through to you? The hype for 7 is amusing.
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|Yes, mjm...compatibility is better. We're testing it, remember? So far, or 3 "legacy" apps are at least *more* compatible than they were with Vista, 2 of them work near perfectly, the third has been updated for Vista compatibility (finally...).
So yes, between what work MSFT has done (the first two) and what work has been done by 3rd parties, at launch, Win7 will be far more compatible.
As for performance? Just one benchmark? Really? I could have sworn I'd already posted that (in multiple previous topics)... I suppose I could look it up again...or you could just Google it.
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|If they had any intelligence, they took one look at Vista, said "this doesn't offer ANY advantages over XP - we'll stay here" and went aobut their business.
Oh, wait a minute: that's exactly what the majority of corporate North America did.
Silly me.
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|Um, yes we do know.
If we had half a brain, we downloaded the RC from Usenet where it was leaked (intentionally) and flogged it.
Since it was released.
And it works well.
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|PC_Tool, you'll have to show it to me, the first two hits for "benchmark pc_tool windows site:betanews.com" showed me nothing of the sort, and they were discussing Windows 7 performance, even. Sorry if I don't follow every comment of yours. There was one comment of yours that said 7 booted in 20 seconds. Honestly, boot times mean nothing, ppl should be hibernating/sleeping in this day and age.
I'd like to see final numbers with Windows 7 Gold, Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3, using industry standard benches like pcmark/worldbench/sysmark where the APPS (you know, the whole purpose of an OS) are faster.
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|"the news may very well have come as a disappointment to software partners ... to enable them time to get their own products and upgrades ready..."
Come on now... You are old enough to know that this will be a concerted release and 'products' will be in the shops at the same time as W7 SKUs...
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|...just like it was with Vista?
Sorry, man...they dropped that ball last time. In a BIG way. There's no guarantee at this point.
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|They've been trying to conduct themselves in the opposite way compared to 2006. They've tried to lower expectations and then deliver solid builds. Hopefully this is more of the same and that W7 is out before expected and that the Holiday is Halloween or Thanksgiving.
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|Toolie, we are not starting to take BN as our source of knowledge now, are we..?
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7...ineeringMilestone2.aspx
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|They didn't drop the ball. They knew they had a pig in a poke from Day One and just let it go. Want proof? Look at the massive ad campaign for Vista. It was huge. Collossal. Gi-Normous. Pigs With Wings Flew.
NOT.
No advertising dollars wasted on a product known up front to be a waste of time.
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|@PRE: Aw, hells no!
*grin*
Point of fact: Upon the release of Vista, manufacturers of Softwrae *and* Hardware were *way* behind the ball. We can BS all day about why, be it getting screwed over upon the release of XP, the mess that was Vista, or lack of communication... but the damage was done.
Hardware/Software release being guaranteed accompanying the OS lifecycle died when vista was released. Can we hope to see it again? Sure. Is it guaranteed? Hardly. The Win7 blogs account for the current state of hardware compatibility with Vista, not *new* hardware and software for Win7.
...all bets are off.
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