Vista Could Ship Earlier Than Expected

UltimaGuy writes "With speculation of a ship date for Windows Vista ranging in the second part of 2006, word has surprisingly surfaced that it can be expected much earlier. BusinessWeek has received a copy of the internal blog of Chris Jones, who is a top Windows executive. The blog states that the code for Windows Vista will be completed by August 31, giving Microsoft the opportunity to place Vista on PCs for the 2006 Christmas season."

Comments

MS invented a Time Machine??

[One Blue Ninja]

Vista was "expected" about, what - 4 years ago? "Earlier than expected", my ass!

Re:doesn't make sense

[Bluey]

Unless you celebrate Christmas very late, it's actually in the second half of 2006. The summary is a complete butchering of what the article actually says, which is something along the lines of:

Microsoft's mum about when Vista will be available, other than "second half of 2006".
Analysts decide this most likely means it will be released on "Christmas 2006".
A MS Executive blog saying "code complete will be August 31, 2006" is leaked to a news organization.
Analysts decide this most likely means it will be released on "October 2006" which is earlier than they previously guessed.

No real news here other than analysts making as many different guesses as possible to hedge their bets.

MS terminology...

[andy55]

I worked with MS for a while, and their project managers use the milestone phrase "code complete" to mean that it's just testing and QA from there (meaning, of course, many many fixes and revs will be introduced into the code after this). So, assuming Chris Jones' comment about being Vista code being "complete" by Aug 2006 was referring to being "code complete," it doesn't say much about when Vista will ship--it just says when non-QA driven changes will no longer be able to get into the codebase past this date.