Today Ina Fried published an article at Cnet that confirmed October 22 as the launch date for the next Microsoft operating system. The source is Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte who confirmed the release data in an interview. Veghte also confirmed that the RTM release of Windows 7 should be finished in mid to end July 2009.

Users who are interested into buying a new computer system right now should better wait until June 26 as this is the beginning of the free upgrade period which is said to end in the beginning of 2010. Users who purchase Windows Vista PCs participating in the Upgrade Option Program after June 26, 2009 can upgrade to Windows 7 for free at its release.

Windows 7 will be released in six different editions with the emphasize on the two editions Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional. Both editions are successors of Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Business.

Do you have plans to purchase Windows 7 in the near future?

The following links point directly to the release candidates at both the MSDN and Technet websites.

Technet 32-bit
Technet 64-bit
MSDN 32-bit
MSDN 64-bit

Probably even more important than the availability of the release candidate is the confirmation that Windows 7 will be released in the Holiday season by Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte. The release date was one of the best kept secrets with rumors ranging from an early 2009 to a late 2010 release. This essentially means that Microsoft will release the next Windows operating system in about six months.

The second interesting news story is that Microsoft decided to reduce the editions that Windows 7 will ship in when compared to Windows Vista. The so called edition chaos was one of the major reasons for confusion for prospective Windows Vista customers.

Windows 7 will basically be distributed as Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate. There are other versions but those are designed for different markets. Windows 7 Home Premium will be the equivalent of the Windows Vista Home Premium featuring a solid set of features. Windows 7 Professional will be the successor of Windows Vista Business which includes all features of Windows 7 Home Premium plus some business features like group policy based management tools, Remote Desktop host capabilities or network-based backup features.

Windows 7 Ultimate will include all features of Windows 7 Professional plus all supported language packs (something that the other editions miss and users have to pay for), BitLocker whole-drive encryption and capabilities to boot from vhd.

It basically comes down to three Windows 7 editions. It should also be noted that there are no talks yet about Windows 7 Ultimate extras, something that did not work as intended in Windows Vista as well as several users felt cheated by the lack of and quality of the extras.

Most of these information have been taken from our own Windows 7 blog which covers all the latest news about the upcoming operating system. A well visited Windows 7 Forum is available on the same site.

Do you think that those two strategic decisions by Microsoft are good ones? Will they convince Windows XP users to switch to Windows 7?

Later that day Microsoft posted a new message on stating “Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta. The volume has been phenomenal — we’re in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand”. The download has been postponed and Microsoft is tight-lipped about the new release date of the beta release.

This is not the first release that is going bad. And it is not always Microsoft that is not able to predict correctly. It seems that most multi-national corporations have prediction difficulties. Who would not have thought that users around the globe would access the Microsoft servers to get one of the 2.5 million Beta keys after the announcement that the keys would be limited?

A question that surely is coming up is whether this resource limitation was intentional. Is it good or bad news if many more users than expected wanted to download the Windows 7 Beta. It is bad news for the individuals who tried to download it but it is good news for Microsoft as all news sites will report that the demand is incredible high.

That means there are two lines of though here. One is that Microsoft got their predictions about user interest in the Windows 7 beta wrong while the other is that Microsoft did not make use of their full infrastructure in order to create a groundbreaking demand of the product.

The Beta of Windows 7 is based on build 7000 which has been leaked to the dark side of the Internet last month. There has been lots of talk about the new “features” of Windows 7 and we do not want to get into detail here as you have most likely read about them all on other sites in the past months. To make it short: Windows 7 feels like a complete responsive operating system. Many users would say it looks and feels like a streamlined and optimized Windows Vista. It uses less system resources, is more responsive and has several usability improvements. It is interesting for instance that netbook manufacturers will release netbooks running on Windows 7 when it comes out, something that seems very unlikely for Windows Vista.

We (that’s me and Everton who writes at Connected Internet) have a Windows 7 site up which is reporting on all the news about the new Microsoft operating system. The site has a busy forum, probably the busiest Windows 7 forum out there at the moment. You can find hardware and software help at the Windows 7 forum, a tweaks section and several boards with general discussion about the upcoming operating system.