Employee publishes information about Windows Crossbow SDK

Feb 7, 2007 09:24 GMT  ·  By

Very few companies can brag about being able to hold on to secret information on their upcoming products and releases. Probably the ones capable to do that sort of thing can be counted on the fingers of your right (or left) hand.

The one company you (and I) know of to have the necessary know-how to obtain total secrecy before the launch of a certain product, software or anything they ever released on the market is Apple.

If you don't believe me, or if you're the worst enemy Apple could have on the face of the Earth, remember the iPhone's release. Only 5-6 people knew how that thing would look before its official launch during the Steve Jobs keynote.

Unbelievably as it may sound, not even the wives and children of those men had the slightest idea of how the iPhone may end up looking like.

Enough with the mumbo jumbo for now and let us turn our attention to the subject of this article. Microsoft has never been known to hire secret agents or people that can keep their mouth shut (or their keyboard from writing too much on a blog for that matter :) ).

Today, I had the chance to be proven once again that this fact is true, because I found out Microsoft has leaked the information about the Windows Mobile 6.0 SDK on the Internet.

Actually, it wasn't such a big surprise and I was expecting it to happen one of these days before the Windows Crossbow's official launch.

Apparently, this time the leak has come in the form of a blog post of some Japanese Microsoft employee who has published the snapshot of a Vista Tablet Gadget featuring what seems to be a WM6 screenshot.

That blog post lets us know that Windows Vista will come with a native Crossbow emulator, the SDK is available for download internally in the Microsoft headquarters, the release of the new mobile OS is probably going to take place at the 3GSM exposition, no Japanese version is available for now and the ability to set the region is also unavailable (the only SDK version seems to be in English) and about the flawlessness of the installation, which confirms the stability of the SDK.