Windows 7 will be released to manufacturing in 2009, more precisely in the third quarter of this year, with information from a leaked product roadmap pointing to the first half of October 2009. The past week, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, revealed the official product roadmap for Windows 7 beyond the public Beta Build 7000. Sinofsky indicated that the next development milestone for Windows Vista's successor would be Release Candidate (RC), followed by RTM (the gold version of the operating system) and then by the platform's GA (general availability).

Lotta Bath, from the Microsoft Sweden Partner team, simply added deadlines to the upcoming Windows 7 releases, mapping a variety of events that would lead to the launch of Windows 7 (via Neowin). Bath simply attempted to answer questions that Microsoft partners had related to the point of reference that would precede the launch of the company's next iteration of the Windows client and server platforms. In this context, Bath claimed that the Win 7 product roadmap dates had been confirmed by Michael Bohlin (Windows product manager). Microsoft would make available the Release Candidate of Windows 7 in April 2009, making its way to RTM in October.

In the meantime, Microsoft Sweden will also deal with the Microsoft Windows 7 Summit on February 26 via TechNet and TrueSec. Bath's next reference points out that Microsoft itself could finish deploying Windows 7 pre-release versions internally by the end of May 31, 2009, remaining loyal to its dogfooding tradition. Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) is scheduled to drop in early April 2009 after the CeBit conference. Throughout June, July and August, Microsoft Sweden will be involved in demoing Windows 7. Subsequently, Bath indicates Q3 2009 for the RTM launch of Windows 7, offering October 3 at 11.10 as the deadline for the gold milestone.

Bath obviously addresses Microsoft partners with the release dates, and in this context, as relevant as they might be, fact is that general users can see different deadlines for Windows 7 altogether. Microsoft is, just as was the case with Windows Vista, preparing two separate launch events for Windows 7, one focused on businesses and the other on general consumers. In this regard, Windows 7 gold could very easily be made available to corporate customers through Software Assurance (volume licensing) by the end of 2009. However, an October 2009 RTM does leave enough elbow room for Microsoft to introduce the general availability of Windows 7 in time for the holiday season, namely in December. Still, Bath does mention “Februari 2010 i kartong i handeln” which could point to the availability of the boxed versions of Windows 7 as late as next year, and indeed three years after Vista' GA.

Windows 7 Beta is available for download here .

Product keys to activate Windows 7 Beta are available here.