On Friday, Microsoft announced that Office 2010 had reached the “release to manufacturing” (RTM) stage, and now the company has confirmed that those who subscribe to its networks for application development and IT professionals will be able to download the product this Thursday, April 22.
Volume license customers will have to wait five more days before they can get the software on April 27, and consumers won’t get Office 2010 until sometime in June.
By allowing developers the first access to the new software, Redmond may be hoping to avoid the criticism it received from developers over service pack releases for Vista and Windows XP.