Microsoft to ship Windows 8 Release Preview today

From InfoWorld: Microsoft will ship Windows 8 Release Preview today, several days earlier than expected, according to a blog briefly posted by the company.

The blog post, written by Chuck Chan, an executive with the Windows development team, went live for a few minutes late Wednesday, long enough for several users to take notice. Neowin first reported the leak of Chan's post and its Thursday date.

Earlier, Microsoft had promised to deliver the Release Preview the first week of June, a timeframe that most, including Computerworld, assumed meant the week of June 4-8. But the company must have thought differently, figuring that Friday, June 1, qualified this week as the month's first.

The late-May debut of Release Preview meshes with a schedule spelled out in March by Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, who said that the Redmond, Wash. developer would deliver the build three months after the Consumer Preview, with a "release to manufacturing," or RTM, edition three months later.

According to Cherry's calendar, Microsoft had to deliver Windows 8 Review Preview by the end of May and RTM by the end of August. RTM is the more important of the two yardsticks, as it's the point at which code is made available to device manufacturers for prepping new PCs.

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