Next Windows 7 Milestone: Release Candidate
How ready is Windows 7? Ready enough so there will be no Beta 2. Microsoft plans to go directly from Beta 1 to release candidate.
Can you say Windows is shipping sooner than later? Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, broke the news in a blog post time-stamped Midnight EST that popped up in my RSS feeds at noon. He writes:
The next milestone for the development of Windows 7 is the Release Candidate or "RC." Historically the Release Candidate has signaled "we're pretty close and we want people to start testing the release, especially because all the features are done." As we have said before, with Windows 7 we chose a slightly different approach which we were clear up front about and are all now experiencing together and out in the open.