It seems the long and winding road to the oft-delayed release of Windows Vista is about to hit the home stretch. Brad Goldberg, the general manager for the Windows client business group, told eWeek that Microsoft will release just one more build of Windows Vista for testing before the code goes gold. That build will be made available to a limited group of between 50,000 and 100,000 testers sometime in October, and follows the interim Vista build that Microsoft released on September 22.
Goldberg declined to say if this final test build would be known as Release Candidate 2, adding that the company was focused, from an engineering perspective, on targeting the group of testers it most wants one last set of feedback from.
Goldberg, who was on a cross-country tour this week designed to get the message out about the business value and benefits that Vista brings, also reiterated that Vista was on track for availability to businesses via volume licensing in November, with broad general availability to consumers in January 2007.