Windows 8 Release Preview download links may go live today

Scheduling blog posts can be a tricky business, and sometimes when you mess up there’s information that trickles out into the wild sooner than you’d like it to. That happened late yesterday afternoon on the Windows Hardware and Driver Blog, where a post announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview will be made available for download today.

Now, May 31st doesn’t jive with what’s been previously announced by Microsoft, but this could be a case of the company wanting to give developers access slightly ahead of the impending public download deluge. Then again, Microsoft VP Chuck Chan was speaking about the Windows Dev Center and the links he shared are open to the general public. The Windows 8 Consumer Preview downloads from the Dev Center point to the same page that non-developers were sent to. It’s not as though he was directing developers to their MSDN or Technet dashboards.

It’s also possible that “today” meant whatever day Chan’s post was supposed to go live and that it snuck out several days ahead of schedule — though the signature line on the post does say May 31 (contrary to the May 30 timestamp at the top of the post). Over on the SkyDrive blog Microsoft recently said that the Windows 8 Release Preview would arrive in the first week of June — which technically starts tomorrow.

The post has now been pulled down, so it’s a waiting game once again. That is, of course, unless you’re the intrepid type and don’t mind installing the leaked Chinese version of the Windows 8 Release Preview.

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