given by Microsoft are November this year for the business version and January 2007 for the
home version. The brouhaha centers around management's recent equivocal statements
regarding these dates. At the late-July annual Financial Analysts Meeting in Redmond, Kevin
Johnson, the President of the Platforms and Services Division, said, "We'll ship when it's ready."
This sort of statement is not at all reassuring. In fact, you could almost make a rule: if a top
manager of a Fortune 50 company says he's "almost sure" of something, that means it's not
going to happen.
So, from the eagle's eye view, I'd say the company is going to miss the dates. But let's take a
look from the snail's eye view.
I've been testing Vista betas as they've come out. I've got the most recent, Build 5472, right here
at my desk, firing away on an adjacent system. It's running a slide show and playing music at the
same time and doing a fine job. True, a couple of functions crashed when I first ran them (the
slide show, the clock settings), but I'm used to these sort of mild interruptions and went right
ahead (after checking the status of the Task Manager by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del) and rebooted them
with no great harm. Laugh if you will, Macheads, this system is almost ready for prime time.
Almost, but it's a long way from the spoon to the lip. While I was typing, the slide show crashed.
No problem. There's a handy dialog that comes up asking if I want to reboot the application. One
touch and we're back in business. Uhp! There's that dialog box asking whether I want to tell
Microsoft about this issue. Of course! I'm a loyal user and beta tester. Click "send" to get the box
out of my face, but, hmm, that gesture reveals another dialog box that says the Sidebar — the
panel on the side of the screen to which you can affix "gadgets," little applets like RSS feeds and
the clock — failed to restart. Okay, back to square one. Well, not quite. The music is still
playing. Re-launch the slide show by hitting the little magnifying glass on the slide-show gadget.
Did I hit it? Not sure. I thought the magnifying glass wiggled, but nothing happened for 20
seconds or so. Hit it again. Ooops! Now I have two copies of the viewer up. Kill one by hitting
the "x" in the red box that glows even redder when I mouse over it. Aero sure is cool. One last
step. Restart the slide show.
So, you get the idea. Never in history has a Microsoft operating system been this buggy this late
in the game.
Conclusion? November is still a solid maybe for the business version. Many of the best
improvements in Vista (things like the way software images are built) are on the inside (not
visible to the average user) and seem more together than the interface and the consumer-
oriented multimedia functions, which are still somewhat brittle. So, unless they change the way
they do business up there in Redmond dramatically, I'm thinking January is sounding pretty
ambitious for the consumer version. January is a lousy time to introduce a new consumer OS
anyway. They should wait until late spring or even midsummer and try to catch the next
consumer wave, the 2007 back-to-school season.
The PC industry can turn to Core 2 Duo, Intel's new chip architecture, for excitement during the
2006 holidays, and Microsoft can take its time to get Vista right. As management has said more
than once, it's far worse to deliver a buggy system on time than a good one late.
© 2006 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
