Microsoft hints at Windows 8 release date

It's far from official, but Microsoft corporate vice president Dan'l Lewin, who handles strategic and emerging business development, has hinted at the Windows 8 release date as likely to be early next autumn, making much the same calculation TechRadar did.

Speaking at the start-up LAUNCH event at the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus Lewin suggested "we will be in market - if you look at the crystal ball and just say what happened in the past is a reasonable indicator of what our forward looking timelines will be and just speculate - we've made the point about having a developer conference later this year, and then typically we enter a beta phase, and then in 12 months we're in the market, so let's make that assumption."

Asked why moving Windows to the ARM chip had taken Microsoft so long after other tablets had come out, he acknowledged Vista had slowed the Windows division down ("we got a little behind on that, I would say") but said Microsoft had to take into account the large number of people using Windows already.

"We have a commitment to our installed base. With Windows 7 on a huge number of devices, we have a very sound and terrific baseline. Given the scale, we have a very strong belief system about that commitment, and a very large customer base that thinks about managing these systems; so systems management, enterprise infrastructure, all those kinds of things."

:story: Full story: TechRadar


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