Two pieces of operating system news today.

“Windows 8 launching late October, RTM ‘on track’ for August”

“Apple Seeds Golden Master of OS X Mountain Lion to Developers”

I’m not really trying to rag on Microsoft (at least not too much) — they obviously have a different customer base than Apple — but in the time Windows users will have gotten XP, Vista and Windows 7, Mac users have pretty much gotten every single consumer release of OS X there’s ever been (Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheetah” was released 7 months before XP).

Microsoft sat on its laurels for a long time, struggling to release Longhorn. But since Vista their release schedule has returned to something you’d normally like to see from a software provider. But Apple’s kept the pressure on and it’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft can offer anything close to an annual release, like Apple has promised. Or, for that matter, if Apple can actually keep their promise.

Personally, I promise to make at least one release of my popular pamphlet “Yachts and You” every year.

Starting next year. Or maybe the year after.