Bill Veghte, senior VP of the Windows business, said Monday that Microsoft is planning to ship its desktop Windows 7 in time for the 2009 Christmas shopping season, with Release 2 of Windows Server 2008 to become available at the same time.

Veghte said Microsoft was releasing the two together after keeping the desktop and server operating systems on separate tracks for several years because of the efficiencies gained by operating the two together.
“We're tracking well for holiday availability,” said Veghte, as the lead-off keynote speaker of TechEd 2009, Microsoft's developer and IT manager event going on this week in Los Angeles. Veghte was addressing many of the 7,000 TechEd attendees at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Windows 7 is the follow-up to Windows Vista and has gotten better reviews than its predecessor for reliability and performance. Consequently, consumers and businesses that have been slow to move to Vista are expected to find new incentives to upgrade, once Windows 7 becomes generally available. “It's pretty snappy,” said Veghte.
Windows 7 has been designed to run effectively on Intel (NSDQ: INTC)'s Nehalem or Xeon 5500 series of chips, which have greater capacity for multi-threaded processing. Servers incorporating the chips have started to appear in the marketplace. Microsoft in turn has made changes “around the scheduler and operating system core” of Windows 7 to take advantage of those multi-threading processing capabilities, said Mark Russinovich, a Microsoft Fellow, one of its leading researchers, who joined Veghte on the stage.
(Source: InformationWeek)