Mary-Jo Foley posted an entry saying that Microsoft was planning to skip the next logical in-band server release, Windows Server 2008 R2, and go straight to Windows Server 7. This created quite a discussion among some techies, wondering why they would skip this release.

I personally had mixed feelings on this situation. I said on one of the tech forums I visit,

There’s only ever been one R2 release, and that was for Windows Server 2003 (and all it’s various sub-SKUs). That was because they had features to release, but no major platform to build it on. Consider that when WS2003 R2 was released, the latest build was the Pre-Beta 2 5259. There were also several other large platform launches that year – Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Now in 2008, this “big-three” was revived – Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and recently, SQL Server 2008.

Also, I think 2010 seems to be on track for Server 7, as that would follow their schedule they’ve kept for a while now, and would confirm the late-2009 client release.

Apparently, Mary-Jo was later told by Microsoft that Windows Server 2008 R2 is on track to become the next version of Windows Server. Supposedly this release is on track for 2010, immediately parallel to the next client release, Windows 7. Then another version, “which may or may not be called Windows Server 7″ is expected in 2012. This would leave Microsoft in a somewhat regular pattern, as seen in the below timeline.

Timeline of Windows, Windows Sever, Visual Studio, and SQL Server 2002-2012

More of my own analysis of the recent events, along with a quick versioning primer, comes after the break.

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