Volgens The Register zal de eerste beta van Windows Whistler in oktober gereed zijn. Whistler wordt zoals bekend de opvolger van Windows 2000 en zal ook beschikbaar worden in een consumer versie waardoor we Windows Millennium Edition eind volgend jaar ook weer weg kunnen gooien.
Microsoft is poised to release the first beta of Whistler, the successor to Win2k, and is expected to hit the market in the second half of next year. We have of course heard this sort of stuff from Microsoft before, but when Windows division senior VP Brian Valentine delivered the hostages to fortune to journalists yesterday, he was likely speaking from a position of some confidence.
The Whistler beta has slipped somewhat, but not disastrously - it's likely to show its head above the parapet in October. And Microsoft is building on something it's got already this time, so it's revving Win2k rather than reinventing it over a period of three to five years. Whistler will be out in business and consumer flavours (but if you think about it, the customisable skinning facilities allow it to come out in many flavours).
Once it ships, Microsoft will have finally achieved a single, unified codebase, at least for its PC operations, and it will be able to implement simple, dare we say trivial, revs a la Win9x. Which makes the analysts comments yesterday more than a little bizarre - these guys do follow Microsoft, don't they?