CNET’s Ina Fried, today:
In a presentation on its somewhat secretive Velocity program to improve PC quality, Microsoft director Doug Howe showed a slide saying that the Vista Velocity program would continue through next spring as Microsoft worked to improve Vista machines that ship in next year’s back-to-school time frame. He went on to say that Microsoft would continue the Velocity effort with Windows 7.
The slides and Howe’s presentation appeared to confirm what has been widely speculated–but something Microsoft has not outright said–namely that Windows 7 is aimed to ship around mid-year, in time to be on machines that ship for the 2009 holiday buying season. [emphasis added]
Ed Bott 
I’ve written a few posts where I have always maintain that Win7 will ship near the end of ’09 and I have yet to see or read anything to make me change the prediction
I am totally feeling July 7th, 2009. I really like the 7/7 aspect for Windows 7 🙂
Actually, they’ll probably release it on June 1st…. 6.1
😉
I haven’t read any of the proposed minimum system requirements. Does anyone know?
Never mind: found out about the sys. requirements. Sorry ’bout that.
Can’t you already feel the pressure on Microsoft (both external and internal) to release 7? “Ship it. Ship it! SHIP IT!!!!!” My hope is that it ships when it’s ready. Whether that’s mid-2009 or late-2009, I don’t really care.
After spending time with build 6801 I’m happy that the core OS is coming alone well. It’s certainly a good build. But I’ve yet to see much in the way of value-add for to lever XP off people’s PCs. It’s a better Vista no doubt, but I’m not sure that it’s better than XP (partly because I’m not sure why people cling to XP so much anyway …).
I’m pretty sure that the system requirements for Windows 7 will not exceed the requirements of Vista.
I’m looking forward to testing out the official beta when it gets released!
Goodness, that was fast 😀 My hope is that they will not ship too little too soon, but I suspect they are under terrible internal pressure to deliver something they can get to the netbook makers.
Adrian
A lot of people, like me, only need a computer to do routine chores ( e-mail, some word processing, light internet and such) XP is good for this and thier and my need for more more more isn’t needed.
Also my 5 year old equipment aint broke so why fix it.
It should not ship until it has a reason to ship, I hope. 2010?
Vista is not doing as well as MS may have expected because it does not have a ‘push’ application. There is no compelling product on the market that is driving business users to move to Vista.
This lack of a ‘push’ app is the reason why people are not leaving XP behind. XP sales were driven by business applications that would not run on older versions of Windows. Look at the people you know that are still using 98. Most of the 98 users I deal with have a particular application they refuse to leave behind (One Write Plus, as an example).
Find the magic bullet then build the gun that fires it.