Microsoft’s two major moneymakers are going to be tagged with the “finished product” label this week. Office 2007, in fact, has already gone gold, and Paul Thurrott has screenshots. I am in love with Office 2007, and can’t wait to get my hands on the final shipping code.

We’re all watching and waiting for Windows Vista to hit the “gold” milestone this week. Thurrott is saying it could be as early as today that Vista build 6000 is signed off as the final shipping version. It’ll be interesting to see the initial reactions from MSDN and TechNet subscribers concerning the quality of the final release. They’re expected to get their hands on it ten days after release to manufacturing. Mere mortals such as myself will likely have to wait until January 30th, which is actually a blessing in disguise: The current state of Vista drivers is still incredibly sad, so this will give hardware manufacturers enough time to get quality drivers out (though they have had API-stable versions of Vista since September to test against). I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy sooner than January 30, at least at work, so I can kick the tires and see if I’m going to upgrade at home. My experience with the betas has been decent but I’m hoping they saved their best performance tuning work for last, because I still don’t think Vista performs acceptably on my Athlon.