Hi all, Mike Nash here live from the Professional Developers Conference.
Today we are unveiling Windows 7 to the world here at the PDC taking place in Los Angeles this week. I am excited to be bringing you this news in the very first post on our brand new Windows 7 Team Blog here on The Windows Blog website. Here, we will focus on delivering to you all the important Windows 7 news and announcements. I look forward to utilizing this blog as a way to talk to you about Windows 7 in the future.
Windows is the world's most popular software product. With more than a billion customers worldwide, Windows has created an ecosystem of hardware and software developers that continue to offer growing choices and capabilities for consumers and businesses around the world. Because of this, we believe PDC is the perfect place to show off Windows 7 for the first time - in front of thousands of developers anxious to start taking advantage of the new advancements in Windows 7.
Windows 7 will build on the substantial investments the company has made in the fundamentals with Windows Vista - improving security, reliability and performance while improving security features that people expect. Windows 7 is designed to be compatible with the same hardware, applications, and device drivers as Windows Vista today.
Windows 7 will offer improved navigation, a new taskbar and a streamlined UI so that common tasks done in Windows are done easier and more quickly. You will be able to share data to all your PCs and devices in your home network or at work. With Windows 7 + Windows Live, you will be able to stay connected to the people that matter to you, and with Internet Explorer 8 you will get a faster, safer, more productive Web experience.
Along with Touch Gestures and Device Stage, Windows 7 enables you to get more out of your devices including the ones you use most often like your digital cameras, mobile phones and printers. Windows 7 makes it easier to use networked media devices to play music, watch videos, and display photos that are on your Windows PC.
And Windows 7 will offer more options than ever to customize and personalize your Windows PC with styles that match your personality.
Windows 7 is being designed to be a solid platform for developers so that they can enable next-generation solutions for Windows. Developers can be more productive and offer new capabilities to their applications utilizing new API's in Windows 7. Here at the PDC, we are delivering the first pre-beta of Windows 7 to developers. This was the first developer release of Windows in recent history to be API-complete when first delivered.
The next phase for the development team is getting to beta. For Windows 7 this will be a feature complete beta and we expect that to be available to customers in early 2009. Feature complete means that we will not be adding any new features once we get to beta (since they are all there) but will instead focus on fixing bugs that we find in our testing and in feedback that customers give us. By being API complete now and feature complete at the beta, we will also make it easier for our ecosystem partners to builds solutions for Windows 7. Watch this blog or www.microsoft.com/windows for information about how to get the beta when it's available.
Mike