According to Steven Sinfosky, senior vice president for Windows and Windows Live Engineering and his blog, there might not be a Windows 7 Beta 2 after all. They are considering that the next revision of Windows 7 goes to the release candidate phase.
Windows 7 beta 1 does look and feel much better than any beta OS that
we tried in the last several years, in fact it is quite surprising how good it works,
and since Windows 7 is really a Windows Vista service pack 3, or should we say
Vista done right, this doesn’t comes as a big surprise.
We
have to give Microsoft credit for lowering the hardware requirements in a time
when 2 GB or memory costs less than 16 euro, but this is at the same time good
news for everyone who wants to skip Vista and upgrade from XP to Windows 7.
This
very much means that after Beta one comes Release Candidate 1, and if they feel
happy about it, RC1 might be followed with final version but you never know
this.
You can check Stevens' comments here.