However, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president in charge of the Windows engineering group, declined to spell out a timetable for the rest of the Windows 7's development. "This is in no way an announcement of a ship date, change in plans or change in our previously described process," said Sinofsky in a long entry to a company blog early Friday.
Although Microsoft said last year at several hardware conferences that it would jump from a public beta to a release candidate (RC), Sinofsky fleshed out the plan today and hinted that just as there would be no Beta 2, the company would also not provide a RC2 build.
"At this milestone, we will be very selective about what changes we make between the Release Candidate and the final product, and very clear in communicating them. We will act on the most critical issues," he said. "The point of the Release Candidate is to make sure everyone is ready for the release and that there is time between the Release Candidate and our release to PC makers and manufacturing."
Microsoft usually runs its operating systems through multiple betas and multiple release candidates. It delivered two betas and two release candidates for Windows Vista, for example, during that operating system's trouble-plagued development.
Computerworld












