Microsoft's productivity suite hits Release Candidate, but it's a private party.
Microsoft Office 2010 this week hit the Release Candidate milestone, signaling that the product is nearly ready for prime time.
Interestingly, unlike the public beta release (which was downloaded over 2 million times), this release candidate is not available for just anyone's consumption.
"Microsoft made a release candidate available to members in the technology adoption program (TAP)," a Microsoft representative told Cnet. "This is one of Microsoft's planned milestones in the engineering process; however (we) do not have plans to make this new code set available broadly."
Microsoft said that it benefited greatly from the wide-range of public testing it had for Windows 7 through its multiple beta and release candidate phases, so it's a little strange that the company isn't adopting the same strategy for its premier productivity suite.
Microsoft Office 2010 is slated for release in June.
Well if you're an Excel number cruncher you'd appreciate the increase in columns from IV to XFD and a million more rows. Fill that up with a ton of formula and pivot tables. Run it on your single core machine and watch that hourglass for weeks.
Yes then we can all type at 23,000 words per minute.
More info on TAP at Microsoft Connect.