Vista May Be Looking at a Farther Horizon

I think that new release is going to bring us all sorts of headaches in terms of security and freedom - as in I think it's going to hinder a lot of things we take for granted right now.(well, it'll bring you MS users headaches. I'll be fine).

In unrelated news, who the heck gets away with promoting a new software product that won't be released for years in the future? Talk about vapourware, this should be called vacuumware as there's a lot less to it than vapour. Really...Mcaffee to launch version X.XX of it's virus scanning program in 2009? Who wouldn't laugh at that? The very idea would be ridiculed if it wasn't MS. The story's not that it's delayed - the story is that these people start promoting the new launch years in the future.

When MS starts talking about a new product it's typically already in the developers hands with an ever expanding beta as it goes, so tens of thousands of people, if not more, have already had the product in their hot little hands for a while now.

Shell out a bucket of money for MSDN and you too can get a pre-release version.

Only 2 things that I'm aware of would hold up a launch like this, which is making the computer retailers suicidal as the holiday 2006 season is shot to hell, would be either Vista is buggy as all and they can't stabilize it OR there is a huge late-breaking change in a critical software or hardware component they're trying to include, something possibly cutting edge.

Just today the NY Times reported Microsoft Says New Windows Is on Schedule:

Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, said in an interview yesterday that he was confident that the software would be ready for consumers by January and for corporate customers this November.

Ahh, from further down in the article looks like Ballmer is listening to a Gartner analyst:

But Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Inc., a technology market research company, said that the shipping schedule was overly ambitious and that Vista was not likely to reach consumers before next March. "We think they are underestimating how long it's going to take to respond to the problems that two million people find," he said, referring to those who are likely to test Vista.

Not sure who's more confused, Allchin, Ballmer, or me.

If it is as much of an improvement as 3.x to 95, or 98 was to XP, I think it will be a huge success.

The difference between launching in january, march or june of next year really doesn´t make that much of a difference to Microsoft long term. The most important things are to get it as close to perfect the first time and deal with some of the stupid issues the EU is having with functionality and antitrust.

Designing a new operating system to work well with the myriad of drivers out there is crux of the problem.

Thngs change so fast that any delay allows us extra time to figure out we can capitalized on it.

For example: the prices for [whatever]vista or vista[whatever] domain names go up in value with each press release.

I hope it's released when it's ready, but for a lot of us working on the web, the sooner IE7 is out and being pushed on people currently using IE6, the better....