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Who's out first?
8 comments- IT TOPICS:Operating Systems, Software, Windows & Microsoft
Which one will make it out the door at Microsoft first -- Vista or Jim Allchin? We all figured it would be Vista. We all assumed that the Vista team would do whatever it took to deliver Vista before their beloved leader let the door close on him for the last time.
We were wrong.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Allchin is still slated to retire by the end of this year. But Vista is now officially delayed -- again. Volume customers (that means PC vendors and big businesses) will get Vista in November. Retail packages won't hit store shelves until sometime in January.
Or so it says here.
One bleary-eyed Microsoft watcher calls the delay "unthinkable." No, it's not. It's easily thinkable. In fact, we all should have been thinking how unlikely it was that Microsoft would meet a drumhead-tight, nothing-can-go-wrong schedule to get its most complicated software-development project ever completed on time.
But amazingly, most of us (me too) thought it would happen. We bought a lot of rah-rah about how Microsoft's overhauled development process would make software delivery more predictable. And how the Vista troops would rally to make sure Allchin's last hurrah would be a big victory chant, not a Bronx cheer. And how everything was going so well -- right on schedule for Vista to be under everybody's tree in December.
It's really sort of charming that we can still have that kind of childlike faith after all these years, I guess.
Now the faith of all those PC makers and corporate customers is being stretched again. November, huh? Right.
Look, it's March now. That means it's eight months until November. Show of hands, please: Who still believes that absolutely nothing will go wrong in Vista development during the next eight months?
All those with your hands raised, get out of the IT business. You're too optimistic for anyone's good.
Will some version of Vista be sent off to some customers this year? Could be. But it will almost certainly be too late for holiday-season PC sales or for corporate IT shops to get any significant testing started before it's time to close the books on Q4. And a real 2006 release assumes that the last of Vista's major problems are behind it with most of a year's work to go. That's never happened with a major Microsoft product before -- think Yukon, a.k.a. SQL Server 2005.
Yukon came out a year after Microsoft said it absolutely, positively would arrive. So let's take Microsoft's statements about Vista's delivery with an appropriate hill of salt, shall we?
On the other hand, whether Vista will get out the door before Allchin is a different question. Maybe it will.
After all, summer is a pretty nice time for a retirement party, too.
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