Alleged pictures of the retail Windows 7 boxes appeared yesterday on a Polish news site (read: Windows 7 Box Shots Appear) which causes some controversy on various sites that picked up on that. Many said that the box shots looked fake and most commenters agreed that they did not look as professional as expected. Good old Long Zheng first joined the group of fake-sayers but later on changed his opinion after discovering a secretive Microsoft-only Facebook group.
The portal of that Microsoft Facebook group contained a banner ad that displayed the number 7 in exactly the same way as the box shots. Long therefor suggests that the box shots are most likely real.
Could there be another explanation for the similarity? Yes there is one. What if Long was not the first to discover the Facebook group? What if the guy who created the Windows 7 box shots discovered it as well and used the 7 from that group to make the box shots look authentic?
The Windows 7 box shots could be real or fake. It does not really make a huge difference, they are box shots after all and not an important live or die feature.
