Longhorn beta1 on 16th of februari 2005?

Appearantly mr. Ballmer told at a Gartner meeting in Florida that Longhorn development is back on schedule and will produce a beta on 16th of februari 2005, and both Longhron and Office 12 are scheduled to be released on 22th of may 2006...
Is this info verifyable?

Would be great if they are allready able to shave half a year off the earlier mentioned release date of 31th of december 2006.

Peter

PeterF wrote:

Appearantly mr. Ballmer told at a Gartner meeting in Florida that Longhorn development is back on schedule and will produce a beta on 16th of februari 2005, and both Longhron and Office 12 are scheduled to be released on 22th of may 2006...
Is this info verifyable?

Would be great if they are allready able to shave half a year off the earlier mentioned release date of 31th of december 2006.

Peter

When someone puts an actual day on a release date, they are kidding, especially if they are a large software company! J ROFLOL

tbeckner wrote:

PeterF wrote:Appearantly mr. Ballmer told at a Gartner meeting in Florida that Longhorn development is back on schedule and will produce a beta on 16th of februari 2005, and both Longhron and Office 12 are scheduled to be released on 22th of may 2006... Is this info verifyable? Would be great if they are allready able to shave half a year off the earlier mentioned release date of 31th of december 2006. Peter

When someone puts an actual day on a release date, they are kidding, especially if they are a large software company! J ROFLOL

When someone types in big font like you they are obviously a moron. ROFL LOLZ OMGWTFBBQ  :rolleyes:

I wonder when the invitations go out / when the guest ID leaks. If they want to start in February, they'll be inviting people pretty soon. IIRC the time between guest ID and Office 2003 beta 1 was like two months.

For that matter, since Office 12 and Longhorn will be synced up release date wise, will Office 12 make use of Longhorn tech, or is this purely coincidental? And if Office 12 will make use of Longhorn, I suppose Longhorn testers will get into the Office beta and vice versa?

However the beta period is planned a bit short. 15 months for stabilizing major changes and additions in Windows? It'll likely fail the predicted release date.

The best way to prepare for Longhorn is .net development, not a seat in the beta program.

Mav Phoenix wrote:

When someone types in big font like you they are obviously a moron. ROFL LOLZ OMGWTFBBQ  :rolleyes:

My fault, posted from Word, must have loaded the font from Word! You must have thought that I was making fun of PeterF, but I was not.
 
I find it funny that Ballmer would attempt to say that a true Beta of Longhorn would be far enough along to release by February 16th!
 
And based upon other Betas released by Microsoft in the past two years, I would say that they have started releasing Betas under pressure, and these Betas are late Alphas.
 
Take SQL Server 2005 Beta 2, with about 20% of the administrative interface functional. In the old days, Betas where 90% complete with some bugs, today they have advanced to late Alphas, without most of the functionality. They are clearly pressured to be released before their time.

To be fair, though, I think that's because Microsoft is entering a development mindset where the backend matters more than the GUI. Where all the API's, communication, etc is all "done". Then they throw a GUI around it.

Having been on several MS betas, I know not to trust any publicly leaked "release dates". Microsoft will release beta versions if they please, when they please, and most of the guessers and "inside sources" have been wrong most of the time.

The Longhorn beta will be cool, I'm looking forward to it, and I certainly hope I get invited (and it would be strange if I'm not, considering I've been on 2k, XP, XPSP1 and XPSP2), but I won't believe any published release dates till the day I have access to the download.

How did you get in to all the beta programs?

I originally signed up for DirectX 7, which had a public signup process at the time (I mainly did that because I was interested in DX for VB, which I ended up never using).

After that I got invited for Windows 2000 when beta 3 was released.

I've been on all the DirectX betas (I even have a SideWinder Force Feedback 2 joystick because I was in the top-ten most bugs found for DirectX 8 beta 1 , and was invited for Whistler (Windows XP) from the beginning. As said I've also been in XPSP1 and XPSP2. I've also done Windows XP Application Termination Reporting (which was a weird beta, because we weren't testing anything that would be released, instead we were gathering data on common reasons for terminating (task manager, End Task) applications) and since XPSP2 I'm on the Windows Update v5 program.

And thanks to the recent video on MSH here on Channel9, I'm also on that program now