In the inaugural post of the new “Building Windows 8 Blog“, Windows chief and Microsoft Senior Vice-President Steven Sinofsky has started the discussion about Windows 8 with the company’s BUILD conference, where WIndows 8 will be unveiled, just around the corner.

In the post he hints that a beta of the new OS will be released in the “coming months”…

We’ve been hard at work designing and building Windows 8, and today we want to begin an open dialog with those of you who will be trying out the pre-release version over the coming months.

He goes on to talk about the potential legacy issues surrounding the new OS, with rumours still flying that it will ditch support for older hardware and software in the name of stability and security.

Windows 8 reimagines Windows. That’s a big statement and one that we will return to throughout this blog. It is also important to know that we’re 100% committed to running the software and supporting the hardware that is compatible with over 400 million Windows 7 licenses already sold and all the Windows 7 yet to be sold.

…before going on to talk about the secrecy surrounding the product so far.

We’ve heard people express frustration over how little we’ve communicated so far about Windows 8. We’ve certainly learned lessons over the years about the perils of talking about features before we have a solid understanding of our ability to execute.

This all looks then like Microsoft are on track for a September 2012 release for Windows 8, which would enable hardware manufacturers to hit the ground running with the all-important back to school/college sales period, and give them plenty of time to gear up for the big Christmas holiday sales.

Sinofsky, who is renowned for his secrecy, goes on to talk about that secrecy and the openness that he promised about WIndows 8 going forward.

We know that blogging about Windows 8 will bring out the passionate opinions of many people, including members of our team. As a team we’re all going to participate—many of us will author posts, and all of us will read and take note of your comments on this blog. We’ll participate in a constructive dialog with you. We’ll also make mistakes and admit it when we do. It is almost certain that something will hit a nerve, with the team or with the community, or both, in the blog posts or in the product, or both. In any case, we’ll work hard to have constructive conversations with you, share the data, and, when the situation calls for it, make thoughtful changes.

It is interesting his comment “Windows 8 Reimagines Windows“. Nobody yet knows quite what this means though there have been enough rumours flying around so far to give us educated guesses. One is to the aforementioned jettisoning of legacy support, instead shunting this into virtual machines based on locked-down Windows kernels.

So far the only parts of Windows 8 that Microsoft have demonstrated, is a copy running on a 1GHz ARM processor and the new tablet interface. Both are impressive but only a small part of the overall ecosystem coming. So far as the rest of the operating system goes he says…

Computing is much more focused on applications and on people than on the operating system itself or the data. These changes in the landscape motivate the most significant changes to Windows, from the chips to the experience. Rest assured we’ve thoughtfully engineered changes across the full range of Windows capabilities. But this presents us a challenge in deciding where to start the dialog.

This again implies that there are major and very significant announcements coming next month. We’ll keep you fully updated here at Windows 8 News on the future of Windows. The BUILD conference is in California from September 13th.

Beta Comming soon => NO!
Pre-Beta Coming Soon => Yes!

its less than a month now for BUILD event where Microsoft Shows Windows 8.
Most probably its a pre Beta version which is expected to leak in wild or maybe its official release by Microsoft.

You don't know that And we don't either

An abundance of specualtion, an absense of facts.

I think:
M4 = Pre-beta
M5 = Beta
M6 = RC (multiple RC maybe)
Final Milestone (M7) = RTM and Offical Launch.

I heard rumors that the beta will come at CES 2012.

We're already at pre-beta...

That rumours were about RC at CES 2012