14 DAY TRIAL // With the Windows 8 development process approaching the Beta milestone, Microsoft is gearing up for the first public preview of the operating system. The Redmond company offered the first official taste of the next major version of Windows earlier this week with Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President, Windows Experience and Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division on stage at D9 and Mike Angiulo, corporate vice president of Windows Planning, Hardware and PC Ecosystem showcasing the platform at Computex 2011 in Taipei, Taiwan.
What users got was just a sneak peek, a small part of what Windows 8 will end up being, with the preview demo essentially focused on the natural user interface (NUI) + graphical user interface (GUI) tandem for Tablet PCs.
There’s much more ahead, the company promised, with additional details to be revealed as Windows 8 gets closers to the Beta development milestone.
“We have so much more on the way! We’re working very hard to get the product ready for early testing,” Larson-Green noted.
All signs point to BUILD, this year’s equivalent of the Professional Developers Conference, with a Microsoft representative confirming to me that the software giant will provide the industry’s first deep dive on Windows 8.
The preview video “introduces a few of the basic elements of the new user interface. Although we have much more to reveal at our developer event, BUILD (Sept. 13 - 16 in Anaheim, Calif.), we’re excited to share our progress with you,” Larson-Green added.
Windows 8 is reportedly in the Milestone 3 stage of the development process, the third and final pre-Beta phase.
I wonder whether the company will have sufficient time to wrap up Windows 8 Beta by mid-September 2011, or whether it will follow the same strategy as it did with Windows 7.
PDC attendants received a pre-Beta M3 Build of Windows 7 back in late 2008, a few months before the actual Beta was finalized and ready for public release.
Time is certainly short, and Microsoft will reportedly wrap up Windows 8 M3 by the end of June 2011, which will leave the company to focus entirely on the Beta.
The Windows 8 preview “demonstration followed our announcements earlier this year about Windows 8 running on System on a Chip (SoC) processors, and our browser engine innovations and significantly increased standards support in Internet Explorer 10,” Larson-Green said.
“Windows 8 extends these innovations and reimagines every level of the Windows architecture — the kernel, networking, storage, devices, user interface — all building on the broadest and richest ecosystem of software, peripherals and devices.”
As far as I’m concerned, it’s almost a guarantee that BUILD participants will be offered Windows 8 bits for testing.