14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has officially confirmed speculation indicating that Windows 7 Build 7600.16385 was the final development milestone of the next iteration of the Windows client. July 22nd, 2009 is the date when the Redmond company announced that it had released Windows 7 to manufacturing. At the start of this week I was telling you that 6.1.7600.16385 was the RTM Build of Windows 7, and Larry Osterman, Microsoft Principal SDE, provided confirmation of this aspect. Microsoft will offer the successor of Windows Vista to the public on October 22nd. However, the finalized milestone of the operating system will be served to various customer segments long before the public general availability date, starting with this month, when Microsoft will offer the platform to OEMs.
“RTM officially happens only after sign-off occurs. What happens is a build gets designated as a RTM contender after going through significant testing and meeting our quality bar for RTM. Then, it goes through all the validation checks required for RTM including having all languages of that build completed. If all the validation checks have passed – sign-off for RTM can occur. [On July 22nd] after all the validation checks were met, we signed off and declared build 7600 as RTM,” revealed Brandon LeBlanc, Windows communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team.
Although Microsoft revealed that Build 7600.16385 RTM'd on July 22nd, the fact of the matter is that reports in the wild already pointed out that the development milestone was the gold release of Windows 7. Furthermore, both the 32-bit and the 64-bit flavors of Windows 7 Build 7600.16385 have already been leaked and made available for download from various third-party sources, all of them illegal, including torrent trackers and warez websites.
“Not only is RTM an important milestone for us – it’s also an important milestone for our partners. Today’s release is the result of hard work and collaboration with our partners in the industry to make Windows 7 a success. We delivered Windows 7 with a predictable feature set on a predictable timetable that allowed OEMs to focus on value and differentiation for their customers,” LeBlanc added.