Microsoft continues not to commit to an official release date for Windows 7, while managing to just send out signals indicating that the next iteration of the Windows client would ship next year, and would be available to the general public ahead of the 2009 holiday season. During a presentation of the Velocity program for Windows at the Windows Hardware Engineering conference in Los Angeles this week, Microsoft's Doug Howe revealed that the Redmond giant is laboring to have Windows 7 on store shelves and pre-loaded on OEM machines in time for the buying frenzy of the 2009 holiday season.

"Definitely the holiday focus is going to be on 7," Howe confirmed to Beyond Binary. However, in order to get Windows 7 available for sale either as a packaged product or pre-loaded on the new machines shipped by original equipment manufacturers, the company would have to wrap up the code in mid-2009. Windows Vista, for example, was released to manufacturing a good three months before it was launched for the general public. Such a buffer period will also separate the signing-off of the gold Windows 7 bits from GA.

Officially, Microsoft is committed only to promising that it would ship Windows 7 three years following the availability of Windows Vista, namely no later than January 30, 2010. In this manner, Microsoft aims to ensure that Windows 7 will not be postponed in the tradition that became the finalization of the Vista development process. Setting no deadlines means that Windows 7 will inherently ship on time, without any delay.

Supporting the mid-2009 RTM and pre-2009 holiday season launch of Windows 7 is based on multiple factors. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer indicated in mid-October 2008 that the company intends to deliver “client operating system releases” by the end of June 2009. There are just two Windows client releases that could pull such a deadline off, namely Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows 7. At WinHEC 2008, Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, revealed that following the launch of Windows 7 pre-Beta Build 6801 Milestone 3, Microsoft would deliver a feature-complete Beta Build early in 2009, then move directly to release Candidate stage and then to RTM.