And by “Holidays,” We Mean Christmas, Chinese New Year or Easter
Microsoft (MSFT) has finally given Windows 7 a release date. According to Bill Veghte, senior vice president for Windows, the next iteration of the operating system will arrive at market in time for the holiday shopping season. “We’re tracking well to deliver Windows 7 in time for holiday availability based on the groundswell of feedback we received from the partner ecosystem, customers and through our own internal testing from pre-Beta to now,” Veghte said in a statement, adding that Microsoft “will not ship the product…until it meets our quality bar.”
And if the OS should fail to meet that quality bar and its release date slips? Well, hey, Vista taught us that lunar new year is the new Christmas, right? As Brad Goldberg, general manager with Microsoft’s Windows Client Product Management team, said in 2006, when the company revealed that Windows Vista wouldn’t hit the consumer market in 2006, but in January 2007: “January has emerged as almost a second Christmas, with gift cards, sales, etc. It’s a new trend.”