All three of these products have launched over the past few days.

I had the opportunity on Wednesday to head up to Toronto for the launch. Steve Balmer was on hand to do a keynote speech and had a few interesting points.

He was asked when Microsoft was going to force customers to upgrade to Windows 7. He countered that they have customers who are still running Windows NT.

Another question was around the 32 bit edition of Windows. When was Microsoft going to stop making a 32 bit edition of Windows. Steve’s reply was that they would let Intel dictate that as right now the Atom processor is popular and doesn’t support 64bit operating systems. As long as Intel was making a 32 bit processor, Microsoft would make a 32 bit edition of Windows.

I also had a chance to hop on a touch screen PC and see how they worked. We use some touch screens for our Kiosk computer and I wanted to see what type of improvements I could expect.

Also launching was Windows Server 2008 R2. There are a few new improvements in R2, most notably, the ability to use Direct Access, Branch Cache and improvements to Windows Deployment Services (WDS). I’ll take some time and cover these topics in more depth in the next while.

 

The last product that launched was Exchange 2010. Storage is something that is supposed to be improved in this version. I haven’t looked at the beta bits or RTM bits yet, but I will sometime later this fall, after my sessions at TechDays Ottawa.