1. RTM isn’t just this magical thing which is compiled and then immediately signed off. It takes roughly a week’s worth of testing (in the Windows world. Shane Nokes, who happens to have experience elsewhere, knows that Microsoft could sign a project off after only three days) before certifying that a build is worthy of RTM.
2. 7600 will be RTM. Stop worrying about which compile of 7600 will be RTM; they only have very minor changes, if anything at all.
3. There’s nothing new in these last few builds. There’s no new theme, no new components… nothing. What’s the point of worrying about which build is compiled if there’s literally no visible difference?

Of course, there’s much more to my little OP/ED here after the jump, so be cool and get to it.

Having said this, I now need to temporarily contradict myself. Vista 6000.16386 was signed off as RTM, and a few people who were involved in testing Vista have come forward to say that those compile numbers at the end actually have a specific purpose. Whether I can believe this or somehow strive to care is beyond me (they’re build numbers, after all. They’re not my life), but assuming they’re right, this means that based on past experience, 7600.16386 will likely be signed off as RTM and 7600.16385 will be handed off to pressies for review. Again, I could be completely wrong, but that’s what’s likely to happen based on what happened with Vista. You’ll start seeing reviews of Windows 7 RTM going live probably within the next two weeks, and these reviews will actually have been conducted on a pre-RTM build.

Now that that’s out of my system, I should state that this is exactly the reason why all this fussing over builds is meaningless. The press, back with Vista RTM, reviewed the build just before RTM. They didn’t review RTM itself, nor did they have to. They’re the same damned thing. If the press doesn’t care about which build is RTM, why should any of you?

The magic in tracking build numbers actually requires a bit of a history lesson. Most of the now-somewhat-old farts who are no longer spending their lives watching new builds get pumped out of Redmond can tell you about the excitement which pervaded the atmosphere every time screenshots of a build (or better, the build itself) from the early stages of Windows XYZ would leak. These guys felt that they could get an insight into how the most popular operating system on the planet was formed, what kinds of ideas the teams had for Windows, and which of those ideas actually made it into the finished product. It was a speculative game, really, and Longhorn came and flipped everything on its head.

AeroXperience’s founding was actually based on the goodies found in the old Longhorn builds. Granted, Windows 7 didn’t see nearly this kind of excitement, but then again, Longhorn was one of the few projects in Microsoft ever to have been bungled so hardly that entire communities germinated as a direct result. AeroXperience was, quite literally, a product of the fact that Longhorn was too big a project; members would tear into every leaked (and sometimes unleaked) longhorn build just to see what features they could find.

This is where the excitement in build numbers should be and, in all honesty, likely always will be. It’s because of those new features which we all want to see for the first time as they’re being conceptualized. It’s because we want to know why the teams are doing what we’re seeing, and why certain decisions are being made. Think back to build 6801, released to attendees of PDC08. Thanks to a good friend of mine at Microsoft, I knew that 6801 was capable of showing the new taskbar. I wasn’t sure how it would show itself or what procedure was required, but I knew it was doable, so I told Rafael Rivera to look into it. He went through a process all too familiar to people who used to look through old Longhorn builds for new features; to put it very simply and likely inaccurately, he tore into the build and checked for any calls which might be relevant to unlocking said features, and that’s how all of you managed to use the new taskbar before Microsoft originally intended.

Where is this excitement for the final builds? There are no new features, no new themes, no new branding bits… basically, there’s nothing worthwhile whatsoever in these last revisions of build 7600. Move on with your lives, listen for when Windows 7 actually is signed off as RTM, and buy it like normal people. There’s nothing special in running that one build prior to RTM. What do you want, a cookie?

Granted, I suppose this mess can be blamed on Microsoft’s lack of clarity on the matter and, as is apparent, just about any other correspondence they relay through the Windows Team Blog (Paul pointed this out, and during a detailed discussion with him on WLM, I’ve come to agree), but that doesn’t give a valid reason to care about which build will be signed off in the next two weeks.

Run along, have a life and be awesome. Windows 7 will be here when it gets here, which is within the next few weeks for TechNet/MSDN.