The most common comment I’ve read lately is that Microsoft has accelerated the development schedule of Windows 7 in a desperate attempt to replace Windows Vista. Dave Methvin at Information Week argues that Windows 7 may mean Vista’s “early demise.” APC Mag speculates on the meaning of this “early release,” complete with a screenshot it calls “probably fake.” Randall Kennedy at InfoWorld piles onto the meme with this prediction:

Will Microsoft ship Windows 7 early in an effort to salvage its enterprise reputation? I’m guessing yes, if for no other reason than they can. It won’t take a major engineering effort to turn the ashes of Vista (which, despite its reputation, did incorporate some good ideas) into a solid OS that corporate IT actually wants.

All of those predictions miss one big point: There’s nothing “early” about the rumored H2 2009 release date of Windows 7. Last June, I argued that Windows Vista was the functional equivalent of Windows 95, with plenty of wrenching architectural changes that spelled pain for early adopters. Most of those problems were fixed with Windows 98. Likewise, despite the current love fest for XP, most people forget that its first years were plagued with bugs, driver hassles, and security problems (remember Blaster?) that weren’t stamped out until XP Service Pack 2.

Windows 7 is following perfectly in the footsteps of those two releases. I went and charted the history of Microsoft’s Windows releases from 1990 (Windows 3.0) forward, inserting Windows 7 into the mix with a September 30, 2009 release date, which is exactly midway into the second half of 2009. Each bar on the chart represents the number of days after the final release of the previous edition.