I briefly caught up with the keynotes live stream of Microsoft’s Build Windows event today. I saw about 15min of it and these are my favourite take aways:
- Microsoft’s Steve Sinofsky said that, I quote him, roughly “Windows 8 will ship when it’s ready, Microsoft is focusing on quality and they will not be driven by a schedule”. That’s exactly the kind of language you hear from popular Open Source project leaders, last time I read it was from a Ruby on Rails framework developer (talking at the time, about when Rails 3.1 would be released)
- Windows 8 preview releases will not require any activation key
- And of course, the 8 second boot time (I may not have properly heard that one, but there was an 8 sec boot time demo’ed earlier)
Microsoft announced that Windows 8 developer preview would be available for download at 3 AM GMT on 14 September. I’m already prepared for a title like “the most downloaded OS preview ever!” or something like that, being announced within a week perhaps. Let me risk a gamble, 2 Mio downloads within 5 days? 😉