Windows 7 rumored for October thanks to streamlined schedule
Reports peg Windows 7’s likeliest release date as October. The 2009 release appears to have become possible thanks to an accelerated production schedule with the current beta edition expected to be the last stage before a ‘finished’ version.
The timeline comes from a blog from Lotta Bath of Microsoft’s Partner Team in Sweden. Bath says the expected release schedule now is a release candidate in April and then a release to manufacturing in the last quarter of 2009, dates apparently confirmed by Windows product manager Michael Bohlin.
A release candidate is the stage where a program or system is judged effectively ready for release; at this point testing is simply to find serious bugs which need fixing, not to add new features or improvements. The release to manufacturing is when computer firms get their copies for installing on new machines; it doesn’t always neatly coincide with the retail release for the standalone copy of the software.
Bath also notes that a survey of staff predictions in the Swedish office produces an average guess of a release to manufacturing taking place on October 3 at 11:10 a.m. Of course, that’s purely a statistical quirk and not any indication of an actual schedule.
That said, there is a theory (best known from its inclusion in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki) which says averaging out predictions from many people in a company often produces the most accurate forecast because it brings together all the small small pieces of knowledge which influence individual guesses. In this case, though, you’d need to gather estimates from across Microsoft’s entire employee base to test the theory properly.
What is certain at this stage is that there won’t be any further beta editions of Windows 7. Writing on the engineering blog for the new system, Steve Sinfosky confirms Microsoft will proceed straight to a release candidate which he classes as “Windows 7 as we intend to ship it”.
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