Office 2010 Reaches RTM!
I am very excited to share some great news with you. Earlier today we reached the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010! — RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release …
Context & Ripple Effects
The January leak of build 14.0.4730.1007 guessed right: Office 2010 has hit release-to-manufacturing in April, exactly on the schedule the leak anticipated, and Microsoft now has a firm engineering lock on the suite it committed to shipping in June when it confirmed the June launch window last November. The RTM covers not just Office but SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010, meaning the whole client-plus-server productivity stack is frozen at once.
This is also a repeat of a rhythm Microsoft established with its flagship OS: Windows 7 reached RTM in July 2009, and the same milestone discipline is being applied across the business division. BetaNews' syndicated pickup adds the commercially significant detail that availability could begin as soon as May 1, well ahead of the June retail launch.
First-order effects
- Volume-licensing customers and OEMs move into the manufacturing and pre-installation phase immediately, while the May 1 availability BetaNews reports would put the suite into paying hands weeks before the June consumer launch.
- IT departments planning SharePoint 2010 server rollouts get their final binaries, letting them start certification and migration testing against fixed code rather than release-candidate builds.
Second-order effects
- With both the Windows 7 desktop platform and the Office 2010 application layer locked to manufacturing within nine months of each other, hardware vendors and enterprise buyers can time refresh cycles around a single coordinated upgrade wave instead of staggered ones.
- Competing web-based productivity suites face a refreshed, fully shipped rival for the first time this cycle, sharpening the free-versus-paid comparison at exactly the moment Microsoft begins its launch marketing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Windows 7 RTM in July 2009, Office 2010 in April 2010 — Microsoft is institutionalizing synchronized client-and-server milestone discipline, which shifts the industry's upgrade calendar from per-product drift toward coordinated platform waves.
The trend: Microsoft is converging its major product lines onto a shared RTM-and-launch cadence, turning individual releases into coordinated platform refreshes.