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Microsoft has told the blogosphere it will reveal more about its next operating system, Windows 7, on 27 October.

The vendor has launched an Engineering Windows 7 blog, which contains scant detail of the planned OS, presumably in the hope of whetting the appetite of Windows lovers ahead of two “significant events” where it will dish the dirt on W7, its forthcoming OS based on the Vista kernel.

Redmond has also, once again, admitted that it needs to be more transparent with its customers.

“We, as a team, definitely learned some lessons about ‘disclosure’ and how we can all too easily get ahead of ourselves in talking about features before our understanding of them is solid,” said head of Windows and Windows Live engineering Steven Sinofsky and Windows core OS division wonk Jon DeVaan, both of whom apparently co-authored the blog post.

“Our intent with Windows 7 and the pre-release communication is to make sure that we have a reasonable degree of confidence in what we talk about when we do talk.”

The pair added that they feel that it’s their “responsibility” to not cause “strategic confusion” among Microsoft's army of partners and customers “who care deeply and have much invested in the evolution of Windows”.

Microsoft’s also claiming to be in a caring/sharing kinda mood: “Starting from the first days of developing Windows 7, we have committed as a team to ‘promise and deliver’. That’s our goal – share with you what we’re going to get done, why we’re doing it, and deliver it with high quality and on time.”

Hmm, Redmond shipping a product on time. That’s a quaint notion, don’t you think?

So, the blog – which is undoubtedly heavily edited by a team of PRs – could serve as a useful stick to beat Microsoft with if it fails to deliver the goods on time and transparently.

Microsoft has continued to insist that Windows 7 won't be available to customers until the start of 2010. But expectations are rising that it will make a crash landing in the second half of 2009.

For now, Microsoft remains tight-lipped and focused on re-marketing its unloved Vista OS. El Reg even received an invite from the software multinational this morning in which it offers your reporter the chance to “explore the new world of Windows”.

Sadly, that's not a look at W7. Nope, Microsoft is well and truly on-message: It still wants customers and partners to depart on the good sinking ship Vista, bundled with service pack one, of course. ®

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