Microsofts „People-Ready” vision that the right tools will enable people to to better business. If you are a home-user or a SMB, the message ist, that you will do your business late, as the software to empower you will be late in the market.

Take a look at the official press-release:

„Product quality and a great out-of-box experience have been two of our key drivers for Windows Vista, and we are on track to deliver on both,” said Jim Allchin, co-president for the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft. „But the industry requires greater lead time to deliver Windows Vista on new PCs during holiday. We must optimize for the industry, so we’ve decided to separate business and consumer availability.”

Now if I were a big supplier like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, … I would sue Microsoft. „The industry is not ready” is IMHO one of the weakest and lamest excuses, I ever heard. The PC makers are preparing for Vista at least since 2003 and they would have loved to sell Vista before christmas. I mean, Q2 2006 will see a lot of „Vista compatible” hardware. Who „in the industry” will need the holidays to deliver Vista? Nobody I know will roll out Vista over christmas if it just came out in November.

And investors punished chip- and PC-makers for Microsofts decision. Shares of Intel, HP and Dell went down in after-hours trade, as investors are concerned about the impact of this delay on PC sales. With that knowledge in mind, I do not really belive the following statement from Microsofts press release:

Said Ron Boire, executive vice president and general merchandising manager at Best Buy, „When people come to our stores to buy a new PC or new software for their PC, we want to be able to offer them a broad set of choices, immediate availability and a great retail experience. We agree with Microsoft that it’s best to do this right — and in this case it’s delivering Windows Vista-based PCs with confidence in January 2007.”

„Deliver Vista-bases PCs with confidence” – WTF ??? If the code is not ready in November, why should it be in January? I won’t belive that Microsoft will stumble into this PR-desaster with open eyes. Imagine a release of Vista to corporate customers in November. Now Microsoft will fix a lot of stuff till January (OK, let’s say beginning of February to be real) and release that different version without someone noticing? I don’t think so. This „updated Vista Roadmap” is one big load of bullshit.

On a lighter note: In the german press, this announcement is acompanied by a „quote” from Jim Alchin, that the delay is due to the fact that Microsoft wants to make Vista more secure. Hello? Longhorn/Vista was initially planned for 2002/2003! If the haven’t got the securioty right till now, two more months won’t help them.

Tagged as: microsoft, mITtendrin, rant, WindowsVista | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Mittwoch, 20060322, 11:34 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)