It appears as if Microsoft is intent do repeat the exact same steps that helped them create a buzz around the Windows 7 operating system. Steven Sinofsky today posted an introductory post on the new Building Windows 8 blog over at the MSDN website. While clearing aimed at developers and engineers, it is a great source of valuable information for end-users to find out more about the upcoming operating system.

If you look back at the Engineering Windows 7 blog, you will notice that it was established in August 2008, exactly 14 months before the RTM release of the operating system. It is surely no coincidence that Microsoft published the first Windows 8 blog post in August as well.

This could indicate that Microsoft intents to repeat the exact release cycle of Windows 7.

Probably the most interesting part of the – rather long – opening post is the hint that a pre-release version may be coming out in the next months.

We’ve been hard at work designing and building Windows 8, and today we want to begin an open dialog with those of you who will be trying out the pre-release version over the coming months.

There is no mentioning of a Windows 8 Beta, but since it is the public that is addressed by the blog post, it is fair to assume that Steven Sinofsky is speaking of the beta version of the operating system.

I’d also like to mention that the blog’s name is Building Windows 8 which is another strong indicator that Microsoft will stick to the development name of the operating system.

He also promised to start revealing features with the team in the coming weeks.

o in the next weeks we will just start talking specifics of features, since there is no obvious place to start given the varying perspectives. From fundamentals, to user interface, to hardware support, and more, if something is important to you, we promise we’ll get to it in some form or another.

The post itself does not reveal to much about the new Microsoft operating system.

I invite you to visit the Windows 8 site that I run with Everton where we, and other authors, post all the news we find about the new operating system.

As far as Windows 8 is concerned, we have just made another step towards the release of the operating system.

What’s your take on Microsoft’s public relations strategy?

One of the main announcements was the new Windows 7 taskbar – superbar as some called it – which added a new level of interactivity to the operating system. Users will have to get used to it because of the combination of static and dynamic items that can now be placed in it. Check out the article at Windows 7 News for a complete Windows 7 Taskbar rundown. One aspect that Microsoft left unchanged is the position of the Start button which still cannot be changed.

Windows 7 boot time was another hot topic. Steven Sinofsky mentioned changes to Windows Services in a Q&A session which reduced the Windows 7 boot time. Services could be set to automatic, manual or disabled in previous versions of Windows. Windows 7 services can also be event related. If x starts run service y. This made it possible to delay the start of several services so that they are not started during boot time.

The User Account Control gets more options. It can be configured using a slider. By default administrators will see less UAC prompts. Standard actions like changing settings in the Control Panel will not display an UAC prompt anymore. It basically can be said that Microsoft optimized UAC quite a bit to make it less annoying to the user.

The Windows 7 Desktop will make use of DirectX 10.1 if the video card supports it. This cuts down memory usage in the graphics system of the Windows 7 Desktop Windows Manager by 50%.

Did you see anything that impressed you? Share your thoughts.