Vista may not be delayed again after all

The industry has been rife with speculation that Windows Vista may not even make its January 2007 deadline. This has not been outwardly debunked by Microsoft, who has not been saying all that much on the issue for a little while (which certainly did not help things). Now, though, an industry journalist at WinInfo, Paul Thurrott, says that Vista is on track.

Mr. Thurrott states that he has received an e-mail from MS outlining some portions of the Vista timeline. Though he is not permitted to reveal many specifics, apparently build 5520 is going to be the Release Candidate 1 version of the software. This will be made available to beta testers and public around the US Labor Day holiday, which is September 4th (Thurrott says the schedule is September 7th).

The schedule also outlines that the RTM (final version) of the software will be finalized before the end of September, so that the code can get out to corporate clients by the promised date, October 25th. If the code gets to corporate customers by then, it is very unlikely that the consumer release will be delayed past its January target.

The Longhorn server code is on a slightly different time-table, expecting Beta 3 in Quarter 1 of 2007, RC2 in Q2, and final in Q3.

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