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

Brilliant...

[Chicane-UK]

So.. this super hyped version of the next generation of Windows has gradually had all of its most attractive features stripped out of it just for the sake of getting it out of the door quickly. So this means that its going to be yet another interim OS, and the NEXT version of Windows is going to be the one that you really want.

We're just going to be left with a shadow of the OS we were all hoping for - and purely so that Microsoft can say that they have an OS that looks just as pretty as MacOS X. Other than that, there have been absolutely no stand out or interesting additions that I can see.

Re:Brilliant...

[10101001 10101001]

A simple search reveals that WinFS was stripped out, while Avalon and Indigo were "decoupled". So, it seems the only things Longhorn has going for it (beyond the new eyecandy GUI) is the "Fundamentals" APIs and WinFX, to plug it into. Truthfully, before WinFS was even removed, it was downgraded from an all-encompassing database filesystem to a wrapper for NTFS that developers can choose to ignore.

The real reason for the comment, though, is because Vista appears to be a dud, quite like XP. Admittedly, XP was a great improvement for people who were using Win 9x, but there's very little in XP that is an improvement over Windows 2000. It's more a fact that Windows didn't market Windows 2000 for the consumer, while they did market Windows 98/ME, that made XP the first of the Windows NT to sell so well to consumers. Now, assumedly Vista will sell as well, simply because OEMs will be expected to carry the next version of Windows when it's released. It'd take severe issues (a la Windows ME) for customers to actually demand to use XP instead.

So, technologically Vista seems mostly a dud. It's a shame, too, since with Microsoft still quite the monopoly in the desktop PC world, them actually making great strides seems like the only short-term way in which the desktop PC will advance. At the same time, I (and probably many others) never thought that WinFS would be finished on time, let alone included in Vista. Something like WinFS has been promised at least since the time of Windows 2000 (I've heard reports of sooner, but I don't recall personally reading such promises any earlier; a link to such a report appreciated). The real loss is that with all the software engineers at Microsoft who could truly design such a working system, Microsoft doesn't seem really interested in doing the right thing for the sake of good design. It's the same reason I have doubts about Microsoft's commitment to security. It's a long-term process, after all.

Re:Brilliant...

[mysticgoat]

The significant point here is that Microsoft is now beginning to position Vista as vaporware. MS has a long tradition of announcing that they will start selling product Real Soon Now to mess up the heads of IT strategists who are thinking about moving their company away from MS products. This works because it activates all the PHBs and any effort to talk rationally about moving the company to Linux (or OS/2 back in the day, or D.R. DOS back at the dawn of time) is going to be met with a lot of thought-avoidance resistance since it becomes so easy to say "I don't want you to waste any time on looking at a possible Linux migration until we see what MS has to offer".

The vaporware stage of Microsoft product development is concerned with projecting mirages of paradise into the marketplace, in an effort to cause potential buyers to wait until MS actually has product to put out there. It is the kind of FUD that MS marketdroids are particularly good at generating. It is the kind of thing that PHBs soak up like sponges, because it gives them such great sounding excuses for avoiding actually having to think about IT problems or making management decisions that might put a ding in their careers.

Am I missing something?

[Silvrmane]

August 31, 2006. Christmas Season 2006. All of these things put it in the second half of 2006. How is this "much sooner" than the second half of 2006?

Re:Am I missing something?

[Junior J. Junior III]

If you measure time in processor cycles, it's a LOOOOOOOOONG time. 4 months x 30 days x 24 hrs x 60 minutes x 60 seconds x 3 GigaHertz = 3,110,4000 BILLION clock cycles.

Oh, please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's some accomplishment, beating some artifical ship date by a few months... when it's years late and has been gutted of its most-touted features so it could see daylight in this decade.

NOT!

They've done it before

[DenmaFat]

Back when MS was shipping a new OS version every 18 months or so, I think they delivered a product earlier than originally planned at least once. It might have been Windows 98.

Getting Vista installed on the fall OEM systems is probably their number 1 goal (quality and features be damned). They can always start taking out the really buggy stuff during the summer.

New Products on Christmas are a MUST.

[_eb0la_reston_]

*Every* consumer-products company MUST have something NEW ready for Christmas (aka. peak sales period).

If M$ *cannot* deliver Vista by September 1st, hardware vendors won't be able to ship their PCs with Vista on Christmas. In this case, I bet they will postpone their shipping date to late-January / mid-February 2006.

As soon Vista is released, PCs with XP pre-installed will be sold at discount. M$ can't "punish" their customers (OEM, not end users) on their peak sales period:

$peak_sales = $christmas ;
    big_profit ($christmas) unless ( ( $peak_sales == $discount ) || failed_business_model ) ;

Re:Interesting coincidence....

[Farmer Tim]

Perhaps there is a way to prevent Slashdot giving multiple accounts to jerkoffs.

Perhaps there's a way to educate ACs about which number is the User ID and which is the post number.

Re:Yea sure.....

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Isn't this just a well thought out (well, at least in the minds of marketing/management) ruse to deceive us as to the real release date? They move the release date forward, so that they can still meet their expectations of releasing it behind schedule, and at the end of the day still release it when it was going to be released in th first place?

Oh goody

[Billosaur]

I can add the date to my calendar of events to be ignored. I suspect I will continue using XP until they stop supporting it. Vista does not impress me at first blush.

What features are left to remove?

[dpbsmith]

Whenever Microsoft advances a delivery date, they usually remove a couple of promised features.

I thought they'd already cancelled most of the features preannounced for Vista.

What features are left to remove?

"Oh, we've found that our customers are asking for the same look and feel of Windows XP so we've decided to keep the graphic design and UI the same..."