As Ian posted earlier today Microsoft have announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview coming the first week of June and although I posted this in the comments I thought I’d also publish a quick post.  As you can see from this table the Windows 8 release is running about 1 month behind the same milestones for Windows 7:

Milestone Windows 7 Windows 8
Beta / Consumer Preview 30 Jan 2009 3:00 AM 29 Feb 2012 2:45 PM
Release Candidate / Consumer Preview 11 May 2009 1:01 PM 1st Week of June 2012
Release To Manufacturing (RTM)* 22 Jul 2009 4:40 PM

* RTM is not the same as General Availability (GA) which is when you can actually buy the OS on new computers or boxed software.

This is good news since if the RTM follows the same schedule we should see that announced sometime during August 2012 which hopefully will keep any rumours of Windows 8 being late, or delayed until 2013, from surfacing.

Anyone placing any bets on when Windows 8 will be released?

UPDATE: Looks like Mary-Jo Foley (Twitter) made the same connection: Microsoft updates the public Windows 8 countdown calendar

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