Microsoft employee Steven Sinofsky had the honour today to announce on the Microsoft blog that Windows 8 is released to manufacturing. That means we'll have to bear with Metro, miss the Start Menu and hope you won't get your Windows Live account banned. The RTM status means that its final, no changes made anymore. The version is now shipped to OEMs and manufacturing partners which can now start testing and optimizing for Microsoft's latest OS. For us, Windows 8 will become available on October 26th 2012. According to Sinofsky the Windows 8 release has been the most widely and deeply used test releases of any product Microsoft has released.
Over 16 million PCs actively participated in testing, including approximately 7 million on the Release Preview that started 8 weeks ago. It's likely that the Windows 8 RTM version will soon leak to the internet, on August 15th MSDN members and Technet subscribers will be able to download the final version of Windows 8, for Microsoft Software Assurance customers it will become available at August 16th, as well Microsoft Partner Network members. Volume License customers will get access on August the 20th and as said before, we'll have to wait till October the 26th. That is, if you're interested anyway...
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