Steve Ballmer Says Windows 8 In 2012, Microsoft Not So Sure About That [Ballmer Reportedly Announces Windows 8's Ship Date, But Microsoft Issues Statement Calling Ballmer's Remarks A Misstatement]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Tuesday, 24. May 2011 under: Computers & Computing, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

It’s seldom a good thing when the CEO and the rest of the company can’t get on the same page vis-a-vis the release date of your next major software update, but if Steve Ballmer is to be believed–and I can scarcely imagine the circumstances under which he couldn’t be believed–we’ll be seeing Windows 8 hit devices in 2012.

The current word goes that Ballmer was out at a developers’ conference yesterday in Tokyo, and is generally the case at these sorts of conferences, the conversation bounced all over. Ballmer talked cloud computing, Windows Phone, search engines, the whole nine yards. But when the conversation turned to Windows 7, that was reportedly when Ballmer let spill a couple details about Windows 8, and how it relates to their transition from Windows 7. Some of these remarks even reportedly made their way to Microsoft’s own press site, where Ballmer was quoted as saying “…we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there’s a whole lot more coming.”

And this is about as close to an official confirmation as you’d get, or so you’d think, but Microsoft quickly followed this up by issuing a truly official statement (what, word out of the CEO’s mouth isn’t official?) calling its own CEO’s words “apparently a misstatement”. This had to be awkward on a massive scale.

So right now, we’re not sure if Ballmer was accurate when he said “next year”, though he would be pretty well-placed to know. And to be fair, it doesn’t seem that Microsoft is actually putting out a year at all, basically saying that they haven’t formally announced anything. So it could be 2012 after all, it’s just that they want to control the tempo of their own announcement instead of having it leak out at a developer’s conference.

So do you think that Ballmer’s initial word is right, and we’ll be seeing Windows 8 next year? Or will they cover their tracks and release at another point in time? The comments section is just below, so make your best guess!