Vista Delayed Again

[Heeter]

Wow, even bink is reporting that as well. Must go check it out.


Edit: Bink is now reporting the story as false as well.


Heeter

 

[napalmnthemorning]

I'm sure that this is being blown out of proportion as NR points out in his link to a MS insider. It is unfortunate to hear such rumors without knowing the facts of what is going on at MS. It is such a big company with so many camps of disgruntled employees. I'm just amazed they have any kind of accountability. There is allot of misinformaton out there and needlesss to say right now with these delays. I'm a little surprised they released 5342 if they are talking about delaying April CTP to May. Whats your take on that NR.

 

[kcnychief]

Confirmed hogwash.
I talked to someone in the Vista group last night, and got the same response.

Whatever happened to journalistic integrity? You know, verifying your news sources and all those things that reporters used to do back in the day, but have now been flushed down the drain?

How did you meet someone from the Vista group?

 

[NetRyder]

How did you meet someone from the Vista group?

MSN Messenger? They're just friends.

I'm sure that this is being blown out of proportion as NR points out in his link to a MS insider. It is unfortunate to hear such rumors without knowing the facts of what is going on at MS. It is such a big company with so many camps of disgruntled employees. I'm just amazed they have any kind of accountability. There is allot of misinformaton out there and needlesss to say right now with these delays. I'm a little surprised they released 5342 if they are talking about delaying April CTP to May. Whats your take on that NR.

I'll say the same thing I mentioned to someone a few days ago. Consider the size of Microsoft as a company. Now think of the number of different product groups there are within the company, and the sheer number of people within each group. It's a lot of groups and a lot of people. There's bound to be politics, there's bound to be miscommunication, and when you put those two things together, there are slips and delays and things that nobody enjoys.

Outsiders like you and I don't know all the details. A media outlet that nobody's ever heard of before comes out and writes a typically sensationalistic story to draw in readers, other news sites blindly republish the story without doing any kind of basic fact-checking, and everybody's suddenly in a frenzy. Suddenly people conclude that everyone at Microsoft is disgruntled and fed up with the work atmosphere based on a handful of comments on a blog. It's on the internet, so it must be true! Amidst all the chaos, one thing you have to remember is that when a bunch of people are busy working on a product, the ones who are disgruntled are much more likely to come out and make their voices heard rather than those who are enjoying what they're doing and are working hard at it. It's human nature. People just love to bitch about things. Even then, there's a lot of excitement within the company - the MSDN and Technet blogs, Channel9 - lots of passion and energy still there. Of course, that goes unnoticed by the media because, let's face it - a controversial story with a catchy headline is much more likely to get noticed compared to one that says the whole situation, if there ever was one, is not a big deal.

Now it's no secret that the Longhorn project has been a rollercoaster ride for everyone involved with it, but when you plan something very ambitious, things don't always work out. Check the Windows timeline. This is the first time there has been such a long gap between successive releases. The reason for that is because most new versions were incremental improvements to their predecessors. The original vision for Longhorn was very grand (PDC '03, anyone?) and things had to be scaled down a bit when they realized that parts of it just weren't feasible in the short term. That scaling down led to re-prioritization and, in turn, to delays. Managing a project of this magnitude is not child's play by any means, and the people managing it are human, after all. People make mistakes, things get shuffled around, and delays happen. Apple's become the new media darling (who doesn't love the underdog, right?), and people hold the company up as the poster child of software development done right. But remember that the Mac OS didn't turn into what it is today overnight. OS X turned five years old today (well, yesterday, now that it's past midnight). I was reading some posts from a number of hardcore Mac aficionados - no, not the lame, first-generation, M$-bashing "switchers" - I mean, the folks who were using Macs before many of us here were born. And they mention what a problematic release OS X 10.0 was in retrospect. Well, things obviously improved over time, didn't they?

The fact of the matter is delays suck. Nobody enjoys hearing about them, nobody enjoys being responsible for them. But it's not the end of the world. Life goes on. Let's just chill and take things as they come. There are more important things to get worked up about.

Holy crap. I just wrote a short essay in ten minutes. But yeah, just my thoughts.


P.S. If you go check out some of the posts from MSFTies on the C9 forums, you'll notice that most of them are actually pretty amused by this 60% rewrite "news"
And Larry Osterman enjoyed spewing Coke all over his monitor after reading Slashdot, apparently.

 

[napalmnthemorning]

Thanks NR. Very good!

 

[Grandmaster]

Here's an excellent article that gives some context to the delay:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/26/business/soft.php

 

[napalmnthemorning]

Here's an excellent article that gives some context to the delay:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/26/business/soft.php

Interesting. You have to question how that engine works at MS on this project. How many updates has Apple done on their OS in the last three or four years. I also use Linux SuSe 10 OS and have been very impressed, and how often do they put out new distros or updates, every 6 months to a year! I don't feel hesitant to express some discontent with how LH/Vista has progressed, but I also would be the first to step up for MS and point out what great OS they have put together with XP. I realize the Vista beta builds have been provided for the developers to test, however at some point there has to be some consolidation towards the functionability for the average PC user, and so far Vista has been a dissapointment in my opinion. Its pretty easy to kick the top dog and Apple is getting allot of attention these days.

 

[kcnychief]

Looks like it may be pushed back yet another 3 months

Microsoft Corp.'s long- awaited release of the upgrade to its flagship Windows operating system will likely be delayed again by at least three months, research group Gartner Inc. said Tuesday.
The research note, released to clients Monday, said the new Windows Vista operating system is too complex to be able to meet Microsoft's targeted November release for volume license customers and January launch for retail consumers.

http://bink.nu/Article6936.bink

 

[Grandmaster]

...not good man...not good at all.

 

[Brad]

Looks like it is going to be released with Duke Nukem Forever

 

[kcnychief]

Thing that worries me is it keeps getting pushed back so far from the release. It's just now May, and the November/January is already getting pushed back. That goes to show they aren't really that close yet

 

[NetRyder]

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company disagreed with the Gartner report and it was still on track to meet its launch dates.

Whom to believe?

 

[Brad]

It will come out in 2 weeks. The spokesperson just wasn't informed yet.

 

[kcnychief]

Lots of people are saying it will get delayed, only time will tell I guess :ermm:

 

[NetRyder]

Well, Gartner doesn't have the best track record of correct "predictions" either...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=43

 

[kcnychief]

Valid point, but everyone makes mistakes.

Was there a study done on how many times they were right?

 

[NetRyder]

Valid point, but everyone makes mistakes.

Was there a study done on how many times they were right?

No idea. We'll have to just wait and see what happens.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying Build 5365...

 

[kcnychief]

What do you do to transport your apps and data back and forth between builds each time? I have thought about putting the build on my production system but I can't be changing the crap around monthly

I just have it on a test rig and in Virtual PC, but because of that I don't touch it much.

 

[NetRyder]

Well, it's the first build I've installed on my desktop, so I don't have a plan for future builds, as such.

It's still a dual-boot setup with XP x64 (although I've been spending most of my time in 5365 since it's pretty solid already), so I'm only keeping the bare minimum installed on the Vista drive. When the next build rolls along, I'll just nuke the partition and do the same thing. Apart from the initial installation, which still takes a while, it doesn't take very long to put my most-needed apps back on.

Data is all on a separate drive, so it just stays there between builds. And since all my Outlook data is on my Exchange server, it all just gets automatically replicated when I reboot into XP.

 

[kcnychief]

And with the addition of your Exchange server of late, I would assume synchronizing your e-mail is a breeze

Is XP x64 ready for full-time use? I have tinkered with switching to it, but not really sure how I feel about it yet.