Windows 7 will be released to manufacturing in 2009, more precisely in the third quarter of this year, with information from a leaked product roadmap pointing to the first half of October 2009. The past week, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, revealed the official product roadmap for Windows 7 beyond the public Beta Build 7000. Sinofsky indicated that the next development milestone for Windows Vista's successor would be Release Candidate (RC), followed by RTM (the gold version of the operating system) and then by the platform's GA (general availability). Lotta Bath, from the Microsoft Sweden Partner team, simply added deadlines to the upcoming Windows 7 releases, mapping a variety of events that would lead to the launch of Windows 7 (via Neowin blink.gif ). Bath simply attempted to answer questions that Microsoft partners had related to the point of reference that would precede the launch of the company's next iteration of the Windows client and server platforms. In this context, Bath claimed that the Win 7 product roadmap dates had been confirmed by Michael Bohlin (Windows product manager). Microsoft would make available the Release Candidate of Windows 7 in April 2009, making its way to RTM in October.