Windows 7 release candidate?

[Aristotle]

Do you think this is for real?

Is Windows 7 Ahead of Schedule?

There are rumors floating around that Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 has already been built. If these rumors are true, then it would seem like Windows 7 is way ahead of schedule. Softpedia has reported that the latest leak of Window 7 is build 7048.winmain_win7rc1.090211-1625. Notice the inclusion of rc1 in the name. And would you believe if someone says that RC1 will be released on April 2009?

[Jozep]

I sure wouldn't believe it if they said it was April 1, 2009

[Rosuav]

Vista == Windows 7 Alpha. Or, looking the other way: Windows 7 is just Vista's features made to work. There are few or no significant feature additions between Vista and 7; it should be easy for them to bring 7 to market.

However, this article is pure speculation, based solely on the inclusion of the "rc1" token in the version number of a leaked release. Microsoft is a marketing giant. Would you state with certainty that they would not, could not, deliberately leak something like this, confident that someone somewhere will give them some positive press? Bear in mind, there's a lot of people who would not publish MS press releases, but would be quite happy to report on a leak of this nature - and people will be more likely to assume that leaked data is reliable (I don't know why, but it seems to be so). It's quite possible that this is true, but it's certainly not demonstrated by this article.

The April 2009 date has been speculated on for some time (I have what looks like an official statement supporting April 2009 for the one and only release candidate, dated 5th Feb; the same suggested unofficially 16th Jan; and speculation in a 5th Dec blog post), so that's also nothing new. However, this is always discussing the RC release - not the GA. In http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.a...tno=599&pgno=1 (which has the 5th Feb date on it), it's stated that MS "is confident of launching Windows 7 before the December '09 holiday season" - a slight difference from April. And even that is "RTM" (Release To Manufacturing) which means that OEMs get it to start preinstalling on computers - the GA release comes later.

(Footnote: Why is the primary release called "GA"? I found an explanation on Slashdot a while ago: Microsoft describes their products by states of the US. A product starts out in Florida (FL) and makes its way around to Redmond, WA, which is the coveted status of being bug-free. When something reaches GA, it's ready for release to the public.)