Launch Date <> (or != if you prefer) RTM Date

At the World Wide Partner Conference (WWPC) this week Kevin Turner announced a launch date for the 2008 Wave of Products(Longhorn, Orcas and Katmai). There has been a lot of conjecture about products slipping and stuff like that.

To be clear this is all about a marketing launch, the RTM dates for these products are not the same as the launch date so you can draw almost no conclusions from that other than we are going to have lots of events and giveaways in Feb of next year :-)

For example when we launched VS2005, SQL2005 and Biztalk 2006 in Nov of 2005, SQL and VS had both been on MSDN for a number of weeks and Biztalk was still in Beta. When we launched Vista and Office 12 both had been available for a number of weeks before hand.

In the words of Cpl Jones "Don't panic Capt Mainwaring"

UPDATE: Doug (now in VSTS Marketing Yay!!!) says that VS will RTM before the launch, as he's in maketing he is allowed to say stuff like that, being in Prod Dev I'm not :-)