Vista: the distant (and receding) horizon

[mdlbear]

Vista debut hits a delay

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a delay of Windows Vista that will mean PCs with the new operating system won't go on sale until January.

The software maker said it will still wrap up development of the operating system this year and make it available to volume-licensing customers in November. However, Microsoft said a delay of a few weeks in Vista's schedule meant that some PC makers would be able to launch this year and others would not. As a result, Windows chief Jim Allchin said the company is delaying the broad launch of the product until January.

Microsoft: Office 2007 to be late, too

Fresh on the heels of a delay in broad availability of Windows Vista, Microsoft confirmed late Thursday that it is also pushing the mainstream launch of Office 2007 to next year.

As with Vista, Microsoft hopes to finish the code for Office 2007 this year. The company said work will be completed by October, when it will make Office 2007 available to business customers that have signed up for Microsoft's volume-licensing program.

What's really going on is that Microsoft will (they say) be shipping something to volume customers in November -- but that's OK because none of their volume customers are going to be rolling it out in volume until they've given it a couple of months worth of shakedown. Microsoft is hoping that the resulting float will give them enough time to get the consumer version into new PCs and beat down the first couple of months worth of show-stopper bugs.

Can Microsoft Make the Trains Run on Time?

By Mary Jo Foley

Windows doesn't have the corner on the market when it comes to slip dates. Office 2007 is running behind schedule, too. So will appointing Microsoft's Office chief to head Windows really fix Microsoft's delivery problems?

And to answer that question...

60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten

Up to 60% of the code in the new consumer version of Microsoft new Vista operating system is set to be rewritten as the Company "scrambles" to fix internal problems a Microsoft insider has confirmed to SHN.

In an effort to meet a dealine of the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas Microsoft has pulled programmers from the highly succesful Xbox team to help resolve many problems associated with entertainment and media centre functionality inside the OS. The team are also working closely with engineers from the Intel Viiv team. and it is now expected that the next version of Viiv could be delayed to line up with the launch of the consumer version of Vista at the 2007 CES Show in Las Vegas.

update: According to Microsoft's geek blogger Robert Scoble, it's "hogwash". Should have known it was too good to be true. The announced delays, however, are real, and a sensible IT person would regard them as minimums.

Let's see, 60% of however many millions of lines of code, at an industry average of 10 lines of debugged code per programmer per day. Yeah, I might believe '07. But I won't give you odds on which century.

Or you can save yourself a lot of time and aggravation, and get the service pack right now from the good people at Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, or Novell.

Comments

[gmcdavid.livejournal.com]

or Slackware.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

They called it "Office 2007." SOMEONE figured it out, or they would have called it "Office 2006."

[mdlbear]

Right about now somebody is probably regretting the move to years from version numbers.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Actually, there is sense to the year/version number thing. The year is actually Microsoft's financial year, and runs from June to June - so any 2007 product will appear anywhere from H206 to H107...

[mdlbear]

I understand about fiscal years, but it's pretty clear that somebody at M$ doesn't understand about market perception. And what happens when the six-month cushion isn't enough and the 2007 product comes out in early 2008?

I notice they're sticking to codenames now for the OS. (Any resemblance to practices at Ubuntu and Debian are, no doubt, purely coincidental.)

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

It's not as bad as you're implying. There's actually only an extra two weeks added to the RTM - so it'll ne sometime around mid-November rather than the anticipated 26th October.

Consumer copies are being held over for a CES launch, as big suppliers like Lenovo and HP can't get machines loaded up and shipped to the US from China - and they managed to persuade MS not to give on-demand shippers like Dell an advantage.

So this is actually MS trying to give all its OEMs a level playing field. Developers and the like will have access to all the SKUs from mid-November.

I'm not hearing the 60% thing from any of my sources in MS. I suspect that lines have been crossed somewhere - if any code is getting that amount of a rewrite it will be the Media Center components which do need a bit of a tweak. However, the lates build I've been using, 5308, is pretty solid - it just needs to make the security controls a little more user friendly...

[mdlbear]

Yeah, I've been seeing "up to 60% of the media center" elsewhere; though I'd also believe that 60% of the total has been rewritten over the last N years. Probably just irresponsible reporting plus the echo-chamber effect of the blogosphere.

It may not be as bad as it looks, but they're still going to miss the Christmas season, and that's got to hurt. And there's still half a year to go; a major problem at this point could still force another delay.

I'm very glad I upgraded my Windows machines this year.

[elimloth.livejournal.com]

And I thought the Mac OS rumors were wild; these Microsoft ones are right up there too.

I am surprised about the 60% comment, and about the only basis I can imagine is the massive machine analysis that takes place across the code base to do deep performance tuning, defect analysis, and security scrubs. Absolutely 100% of any newly developed or modified code is required to go through this process, so if the changes to Vista touched a few lines each in 60% of the files, then yes, 60% of the code would be considered changed and requires machine analysis anew.

And yes, those security controls truly suck right now. Only engineers and lawyers would love the current security controls.

[mdlbear]

Hmm; I hadn't seen that particular speculation, but it's entirely possible: at least one bug in 60% of the {files, modules, whatever}.

60% of something plus a careless and/or sensation-mongering journalist. Sounds plausible.