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Comment by judah | Hacker News Reader

Nice. Microsoft heard complaints that developers had no early access to 8.1, so they reversed their stance and released it to MSDN subscribers.

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It's not like they didn't release it because they were stubborn or whatever. They didn't release for a reason - it wasn't ready. But because of bad press so far they will release it anyway - not fully ready, and hope that not being fully really won't give them even more bad press.

Except that RTM != GA

Yeah, the term RTM no longer means "final" like it used to. It's more like shipping a late release candidate, then hoping by GA Windows Update will install the actual finished parts.

This is the thing that has annoyed me the most about this whole thing. RTM has always meant "release to manufacturing and IT pros". If Microsoft wanted to change this fair enough but they shouldn't have called it an RTM if that isn't what they meant.

Yep, RTM is basically also known as a 'Gold' release or essentially the same thing end users will get - minus marketing materials and other assorted items that come along with a final consumer release.

They should not have called it RTM if it wasn't really RTM.

Feature Freeze, Feature Complete, Alpha, Beta, Release Candidate, Gold, Release To Manufacturing...

I've worked at a few software companies and none of them have used these terms quite the same way.

Other companies are not the point here though. Microsoft is and they have been consistent in their use for the past two decades or more so why the sudden change?

http://allthingsd.com/20130626/ballmer-at-build-microsoft-mo...

Sorry but I don't really see the link between that article and Microsoft's inconsistent use of the term RTM.

They can still move to a rapid release cycle and have a solid RTM. Chrome and Firefox manage to do it every 6 weeks.

RTM was accurate in this case though, no? They did release this to their OEM partners to use as the basis for machines shipping in Q4, with the expectation that Windows Update will finish applying any interim changes, bug fixes, updates, etc.

It's understandable that they didn't want a bunch of review articles popping up insinuating that it's the final revision of 8.1 when customers with Internet connections would essentially be getting revved to a later build during installation.

I think this is a case where not listening to your customers would be the smarter choice, especially if you're as big as Microsoft.

Microsoft have released not-ready operating systems to developers in the past, clearly marked as such. This is obviously desirable when developers will need to do additional work to ensure their applications are compatible.

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