Windows 7 may be early, Google tells Mary Jo Foley

Owen Thomas — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:20:00 EDT

Microsoft says that Windows 7, the badly needed replacement for Windows Vista, the operating system so laughably bad it tried renaming it, is coming out in 2010. Officially. But Mary Jo Foley, the longtime Microsoft observer, thinks it's coming sooner — before the middle of next year, quite possibly. Foley has plenty of sources she talks to on the phone, but she does some of her best work piecing things together at her keyboard.

First clue: Microsoft has said Windows 7 will ship before the next WinHEC event, a conference for PC makers who license Windows. Second clue: While Microsoft hasn't publicly announced a date for the next WinHEC, a New Orleans convention site lists it as happening next May — something Foley found not by dialing for dollops of information, but rather by Googling it.

Microsoft bought Yahoo, according to new Microsoft book

Owen Thomas — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Remember that brief moment this spring when everyone was saying Microsoft-Yahoo was a sure thing? That was when ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley must have put the finishing touches on her new book, Microsoft 2.0. On page 4, Foley writes: "This is a book on Microsoft's next chapter. It's going to be an unpredictable one, as Microsoft's purchase of Yahoo earlier this year makes evident." Committing the purchase to ink on paper was foolish of Foley, no matter what the odds were on Microsoft buying Yahoo, since even a clean deal would likely have taken a year to close.

The back cover also manages to misspell the URL of Robert Scoble's Scobleizer blog. Old Microsoft hands like Foley know to wait until the third version of any Microsoft product, since it takes the software giant that long to get things right. Sounds like readers should do the same for her book.

Closeups of the pages, from a tipster:

Gawker: valleywag, mary jo foley

Windows 7 may be early, Google tells Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft bought Yahoo, according to new Microsoft book