Earlier this evening, both Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott blogged that they thought the announcement of the Windows 8 beta (aka Customer Preview) would be happening at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona on February 29th.
My guess was February 27th … to coincide with MVP Summit 2012. But I get the mobile tie in with ARM tablets.
I expected MSFT to stay quiet, but the MS Press twitter account said at around 7:20pm (Irish time):
@MicrosoftPress: Just received confirmation that the availability date of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is February 29th!
And lo and behold, it isn’t a beta, it is a Customer Preview as Mary Jo said it would be several weeks ago.
Odds are it’ll be announced at around 6am Seattle time. I’ll be in a hotel in the suburb (or “city”) of Bellevue at the time, waiting with a USB 3.0 stick to prep a Windows To Go build and get cracking. Hopefully my lab will have arrived by then, and I can VPN into work and start building a lovely 10 GB networking Windows Server 8 Hyper-V environment. Hopefully.
I wonder if MS Press was supposed to tweet that …