Free copies of the released versions of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 (if you're in the UK, plus some other caveats)

UPDATE: Just to correct a few misquotes I've seen, I'm not predicting release dates, just saying that if you take part in the online launch and are one of the lucky 1000 we'll send a copy when the products are available. I'm not saying whether these products will or won't be available on Jan 19th - we'll ship them to you when we have them. The key phrase from my original post below is "...as soon as they're available".

We currently planning on giving away 1000 free copies of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 - the final, released versions - as soon as they're available. However, before you bite my arm off, there are a few caveats:

1) These are for UK people only, so you need to have a UK address for us to ship to

2) You need to be a developer. We love developers :-)

3) And this is the big caveat: You need to take part in our UK developer online launch event on January 19th and 20th (yes, I know the 20th is a Saturday).

At the moment I just want readers of this blog to be aware that we're planning to do this, I'll have more details once we've thrashed them out. But there's no catch, if you take part in the online launch event (and we're working out exactly what we mean by "take part") you'll have a chance to get one of those 1000 copies. Or at least, that's the plan.

Just by the way, we're having a physical launch event too at the same time ie 19th and 20th Jan. And we've already lined up a big-gun keynote speaker from the US. As soon as registrations open I'll post the details here.

Stay tuned for more.