We know that Microsoft will be talking about Windows at its Worldwide Partner Conference this week. Head of corporate communications Frank Shaw let slip that "we'll have news about Windows" (as well as products and services "that span from your pocket, to the desktop, to the traditional data centre and into the cloud").
It's possible that could just be Windows 7 sales figures or even the Windows 7 Service Pack 2 release date. But as Windows 7 SP1 was only released in late February this year and SP2 isn't due until sometime next summer (service packs are typically 12-18 months apart) we're expecting that Windows news to be about Windows 8 – probably with more details about what's in the desktop and notebook versions that partners are likely to be working with, and another video in the Building Windows 8 series.
There will also be details of the new Metro-inspired interface for
Surface 2, as the Surface 2 SDK will be released at WPC; the SDK will help developers write touch apps for both Windows 7 and Surface and the new interface may give further clues about touch in Windows 8.
But it's possible that we might not have to guess about Windows 8 much longer. According to tipster @MSFTtm, Microsoft might even release a Community Technology Preview of Windows 8 at the conference. While the anonymous tweeter has a good record on announcing what number the internal builds of Windows 8 are up to (and which ones are likely to leak), we're not convinced.
With so little information available on how work is progressing, it's hard to say whether the Windows 8 code could be ready, but it's certainly possible. The internal Milestone 2 build took Microsoft five months to complete, going through the stages of coding, integration, bug fixing and final build before getting signed off in February this year. The Milestone 3 build – the last of the major internal milestones before the beta - was a little quicker and is believed to have been finished by June.
That fits in well with rumours of an internal build of the beta in late July, with a month for testing before the release to developers at
Microsoft's BUILD conference in September. Having a CTP ready this month would also fit with what we believe about the development schedule; the question is whether it makes sense.
Beta at BUILDFor one thing, Windows head Steven Sinofsky said at D9 that "the next milestone is the developer conference in September".
While the Microsoft partners are hugely important to Microsoft, they're not the right audience for the first details of the Windows 8 internals, or the first chance to try out Windows 8. The developers who will be at BUILD are a much better audience for that, and we expect to see not just a CTP but a public beta then.
That's some months ahead of what we saw for Windows 7, where the M3 build was distributed at the 2008 Professional Developers Conference in late October and the beta followed in January 2009 (the release candidate arrived in May 2009).
After the success of Windows 7, Microsoft doesn't have the same need to persuade hardware manufacturers and software developers (or users) that the next version of Windows will be interesting that it did after the delays and poor reception of Vista. The decision to aim for three years after Windows 7 rather than two was made so that Windows 8 would be done right rather than shipped as quickly as possible. That means we don't expect Microsoft to publicly distribute a version of Windows 8 until it's confident it will work well for testers.
But we do expect to get a lot more details about Windows 8 this week (without the in-depth developer questions being answered). Although he's talking about the Windows Phone platform what Microsoft's Brandon Watson explained recently applies equally well to Windows itself.
"Bringing a product to market requires a healthy balance between marketing features and empowering the ecosystem. Striking that balance is all about sequence… [before giving the OS to developers] we had to first set some context so that the market would have a good understanding of the product and not define us only by those features that developers uncovered," said Watson.
ARMlessThe OEMs who will be selling Windows 8 systems are already getting builds regularly (they're widely believed to be the source of the builds that have been leaked so far), so Microsoft might be preparing a
CTP of the beta for them to try out on hardware to be distributed at BUILD.
At the 2009 PDC Microsoft gave attendees a tablet PC notebook crammed with sensors to encourage them to write apps using touch, location, acceleration and the other new services in Windows 7. One explanation for the rumour from unnamed component suppliers that Microsoft would bring out its own Windows 8 tablet (to be built by Texas Instruments, who last month announced multi-core OMPA 4 ARM chips that will run Windows
could be a Microsoft-branded ARM tablet for the developers at BUILD. A preview build for testing on such a hypothetical tablet would need to be finished about now and that might be packaged up as a private CTP that Microsoft would also distribute to other tablet manufacturers.
If Microsoft isn't distributing an ARM tablet to BUILD attendees then neither the beta at BUILD nor the rumoured CTP this week will run on ARM processors – just Intel systems. That's because there are no ARM systems on the market that you could load a Windows 8 build onto. The first samples of the first Qualcomm and TI chips that will run Windows will be only available this month and what Microsoft has been demonstrating (at CES, D9 and Computex) are 'bread-boarded' systems using prototype components. We don't even expect Windows 8 for ARM to be something you can buy separately from the tablet it runs on and a CTP for conference attendees or a widely distributed beta would have to run on existing Intel PCs.
Red pill Blue pill We don't expect Microsoft to confirm a shipping date for Windows 8 this week; at D9 Sinofsky joked the date is a "defence department secret". At CES he told TechRadar "what we try to aim for is that somewhere between 24 and 36 months between releases is about right." He repeated that – "we're aiming to keep new Windows builds coming every two the three years"– but also added "I can tell you it won't be this fall".
After possibly confirming that Windows 8 will ship in 2012 during a speech in Japan, Steve Ballmer didn't give many clues when he addressed the finalists of the Imagine Cup on Friday (although he is still using the Windows 8 name freely); "Hey, what's Windows 8? How do we drive it? What do we make happen? What are the key phenomena? When do we get to release it? How do we make it better, and better and better? Yes, there are some other guys we compete with. Boom! We've got to do better, and better, and better, and better, and better."
Even Microsoft corporate vice president Dan'l Lewin, who's come the closest to giving a date, has only suggested that "typically we enter a beta phase and then in 12 months we're in the market".
We've heard that not only are there multiple versions of Windows 8 builds – with 'red pill' builds with the basic Windows interface going to OEMs and 'blue pill' builds with the new touch interface reserved for key Microsoft employees (a reference not just to The Matrix but to the blue security badges permanent Microsoft employees carry on campus) - but that there are different versions of the developer and shipping schedule. This is the kind of security that Apple routinely uses to keep details of upcoming releases secret, and it makes it hard to judge rumours about shipping dates.
Claims that the release candidate will be available in January (in time for Steve Ballmer's CES keynote and Dell's leaked Windows 8 tablet), followed by releasing finished code to manufacturers in April 2012 put Windows 8 on an even faster schedule than the completion dates for the milestone builds.
The ARM version of Windows 8 is tied to when the chips are ready; Texas Instruments has said that "devices [using its chips are] expected to hit the market in first half 2012". That certainly suggests that Windows 8 will be done sooner than the July 2012 date for RTM that we've previously calculated based on the Windows 7 schedule. But as always with Windows, the real answer is that it will ship when it's ready.
