Windows 8 on track for 2012: A slide from Microsoft's 2009 Professional Developers Conference confirms that Windows 8 is being prepared for 2012.
It has long been believed that the next version of Windows, codenamed Windows 8, would launch three years after Windows 7, just as Windows 7 was scheduled to launch three years after Vista. The speculation ended on Tuesday, however, as Stephen Chapman of the Msftkitchen blog unearthed a slide which slots Windows 8 in a 2012 launch window.
Very little is known about Windows 8 at this time, particularly because Microsoft is almost assuredly in the idea stage of the product’s development. The only known focus of Windows 8 is to improve file replication performance for the company’s Branch Cache technology