Windows Me schedule updated with "imminent" release candidate

According to the Windows Millennium Edition ("Windows Me") "BugMaster," the first release candidate of Microsoft's last Windows 9x product--which he refers to as "RC0"--is "imminent." And this corresponds nicely with Microsoft's internal timetable for the product, which I embarrassingly misreported last week: Microsoft signed off on Windows Me Beta 3 on April 7, 2000 and gave itself five weeks to arrive at the first release candidate (which this document describes as "RC1", not "RC0"). This places the due date of the first release candidate at May 12, 2000, not May 5 as I previously reported. (This is where my lack of math skills comes into play, obviously). So the final release of the product, which is set for five weeks after the first release candidate, is June 16, 2000.

"We are at the stage in the product (RC0 is imminent) where we think we are pretty much finished," the Windows Me "BugMaster" informed testers last weekend. Microsoft has asked testers with outstanding bugs to let the company know about any issues that haven't yet been addressed in the product. Microsoft is fast-tracking Windows Me so that it can ramp up to Whistler, the next version of Windows, and one that is based on Windows 2000, not the old 9x code-based used by Windows Me.

My apologies for the error: I've corrected the online version of the original article