Microsoft Corp. may begin shipping its Windows 7 operating system as early as the third quarter, months before the software maker’s official prediction, a computer-industry executive said.
“According to current planning, it should be late September or early October,” said Ray Chen, president of Taipei-based Compal Electronics Inc.，the maker of laptop personal computers for Hewlett-Packard Co. and Acer Inc.
Windows 7, Microsoft’s first operating system since the general release of Vista in January 2007, may help spur sales of PCs amid the global recession, Chen said. Worldwide notebook shipments this year will be little changed from 2008 at 120 million to 125 million units, he told an investors’ conference at the company’s headquarters today.
“Windows 7 has much better performance than Windows Vista,” said Daniel Chang, a computer-industry analyst at Macquarie Securities Ltd. in Taipei. “The reviews have been excellent and there’s been real improvement in the user interface.”
Microsoft dropped 40 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $16.77 at 12 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares had declined 38 percent in the past year before today.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, has been officially saying the new system will be released about three years after Windows Vista went on sale, or January 2010. Amelia Agrawal, a spokeswoman in Singapore for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, repeated that statement today.
Good Product
Some Microsoft executives have suggested the debut may come earlier. In October, Bill Veghte, a senior vice president in the Windows group, said the product would be released in a year, closer to the timeline cited by Compal. In April 2008, co-founder Bill Gates said the next version would be out “in the next year or so.”
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer yesterday declined to predict how well Windows 7 will sell and whether the program will help pull PC sales out of the slump. Consumer and corporate demand is waning, a trend that will continue, he said.
“We have a pretty good product,” he said of Windows 7 at a meeting with analysts in New York. “We have some pent-up latent interest, as people have been testing but not deploying Vista, but we’ll have to see.”
Microsoft faces increasing competition for its operating system, which runs more than 90 percent of the world’s PCs. Windows lost a percentage point or more of market share to Apple Inc.’s Mac program over the past year, Ballmer said. Windows also may vie with Google Inc.’s Android operating system, now used for mobile phones, as it begins appearing on notebook PCs, he said.
Sales of low-cost notebooks, or netbooks, eroded earnings at Microsoft during its fiscal second quarter because they use Windows XP with a lower license fee than its Vista system. Revenue at the division that makes Windows fell 8 percent during the period, the company said last month.
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