Microsoft officially announces Windows 8 release date to be October 26th

Microsoft has announced on its WindowsTeamBlog that Windows 8 will be available on October 26th. Steven Sinofsky, the president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, made the announcement at Microsoft's annual sales meeting. Earlier this month at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, the software company said that Windows 8 would hit RTM status in early August and would ship in late October.

Windows 8 is a massive bet for Microsoft as they are completely changing the way people experience their Windows computers. With their hybrid desktop/tablet OS, which also shares a kernel with Windows Phone 8, Microsoft is building a unified platform across all of its products. The next Xbox console will probably get the same unified UI philosophy.