More Indications Windows 7 Is Coming In 2009

An anonymous reader writes "Following on the news that Microsoft was going straight to a RC for Windows 7, the One Microsoft Way blog has put together some dates on the upcoming roadmap for Vista's successor. Microsoft has always said 'three years after the general availability of Windows Vista,' which was released on January 30, 2007, and that the release date was also dependent on quality. Internally though, Microsoft is saying other things. It looks like we'll see the RC coming in April, and a final RTM version before October 3. Yes, that means Redmond is currently hoping to get Windows 7 out the door in 2009."

Comments

Faster!

[LordKaT]

Debug faster or you'll be gettin' the whip, m'boy!

Re:Problems in Vista still unresolved in Windows 7

[RiotingPacifist]

you are aware that there is no stable branch of linux right. so linus has the right to change the way the linux kernel handles content, whenever he wants.

Re:Don't focus on money! (OT)

[pz]

Your university is a for profit organization. Guess from where they are getting the money to pay Microsoft for the university wide license.

Wow. It's amazing that this was moderated insightful, as it is so deeply, fundamentally wrong.

While there are a few educational institutions that are operated as for-profit commercial entities, the vast majority are non-profit. (I'm in the midst of creating a non-profit foundation myself.) That does not mean they are not interested in income ("non-profit" does not mean "zero income" and if you thought that, I have an exciting investment opportunity to talk to you about).

Where does the money come from? Tuition is an important, but relatively small component of total income. There's also interest and dividends from the endowment, alumni donations, benefactors, licensing agreements for sports and memorabilia, licensing agreements for IP, conference hosting fees, catering services, and (hugely important) grants from private foundations and the federal government. If the university includes a medical or veterinary school, then it might also have significant income from its teaching hospital. Depending on the university, there might be other significant services they offer to commercial customers as well.

Sounds like a lot of money. It is. The expenses are huge as well, primarily salaries and infrastructure but, also, travel, supplies, capital expenditures, scholarships, grants, and so forth.

Depending on the university, and the skills of its negotiating team, the site-wide license for Windows might well be a donation from Redmond.

That's right, your tuition. I hope you are using Windows, as you are paying for it in any case.

That's a specious argument. You could just as easily say that your tuition pays for, oh, the football team, so I hope you're watching every game; or, the lights in the English Department's reading room, so I hope you're going there often; or, the salary of the professor who teaches Ethnic Cultures of the Pre-Mayan Americas, so I hope you're taking that class. To think that there's a direct line between tuition and any single expenditure -- real or imagined -- is so severely simple-minded that it's troublesome. To argue that since one small part of your tuition could be used to pay for some particular offering at the university you should therefore use that offering is absurd.