Microsoft Releases Vista, Longhorn Server, Office Betas

In an unusual move, Microsoft Tuesday simultaneously released beta versions of its three major upcoming software releases"”Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Windows Server, code-named Longhorn. This is unusual as this kind of platform wide cross product release has never been attempted by any software major to the best of my knowledge

“We have never had this synchronized in this way before,” said Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates during his keynote to kick off Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle. Beta 2 of Vista, Office 2007 and Longhorn will all be available this week.

This launch can be seen as giving breathing space for itself as of late Microsoft has been under a lot of fire lately for missing deadlines for the next releases of its products. . The company recently pushed back the releases of both Windows Vista and Office 2007 until January 2007.Microsoft’s goal with releasing all the beta products at once is to allow customers to see how the products can be used together to improve visibility into business processes, worker productivity and collaboration, and data management across an organization, Gates said.