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Windows 8 beta for tablets at September PDC?
You don't need us to tell you what you already know in your gut to be true: Redmond is working hard on its tablet strategy. How embarrassing is it for Microsoft, the company that pioneered tablets and the 7-inch UMPC, to be completely absent from the conversation in 2010 and 2011? That could change in September. Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley recently shared the slide above which she believes to be 99.99 percent genuine. The timeline shows the major milestone dates for a Windows 8 (aka, "Windows Next") release -- an OS that M. JoFo believes to be focused on tablets (aka, "Lap PCs" in Microsoft parlance) with its purpose-built touch-centric design. According to the slide, we're looking at an M2 milestone this month followed by M3 in July or August. Foley says that would put Microsoft on track for a Windows 8 beta release right around Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) event in September followed by a second beta in 2012 before being released to manufacturing around the summer of 2012 -- just like we heard early last year and just in time for Dell's Hancock tablet. There are still many open questions including Microsoft's ARM vs. Intel priorities and how the company plans to scale across the enterprise and the "workhorse PC" and "Family Hub PC" in the home. Hit the ZDNet link below for a deeper read or better yet, head on over to TechRepublic where Mary Jo Foley put together an excellent webcast outlining Microsoft's tablet strategy in much more detail.
Internet Explorer 9 to sport GPU acceleration and HTML5 support
Even if you don't have a favored fighter in the browser wars, you have to admit Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been looking mighty unfit over the last few years. Younger and fitter contenders like Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome have arguably overtaken the old stalwart, and now Microsoft is making some much-needed noise about fighting back. The software giant has been giving developers and curious journalists a very early peek into its IE 9 progress at PDC, with its stated ambitions including faster Javascript (see table above), HTML5 support, and hardware acceleration for web content. By harnessing DirectX and your graphics processor, the new browser will offer improvements in text readability and video performance, as well as taking some of the load off the CPU. Development has only just got under way, mind you, so there's still plenty of time to screw it all up. Or make it awesome.
Clouds on Vista's horizon to be dubbed Strata?
When Ballmer dropped a few sprinkles of information about Vista's successor, he dubbed it "Windows Cloud," but said the real moniker would be unveiled at the Professional Developers Conference later this month in LA. That show's agenda was recently posted, and interestingly contained a number of sessions under the header "Windows Strata," leading many to believe that it's the true name of Redmond's next offering. That the section was quickly changed to "Windows 7" makes things all the more suspicious, but don't go cyber-squatting WindowsStrata.com just yet (oops, too late). Strata -- a term that can apply to the layers of the atmosphere -- might be more of a general classification for numerous cloud computing-related offerings destined for all manner of devices. But if so, why rename the sessions, and why the secrecy? And, most importantly, why are we so intrigued?[Via CNET]
