| Three Years Late, and Counting
The delay is really going to hit the PC industry hard, because it was expected that Vista would be available for the Xmas season and fuel high levels of sales. The failure is expected to hit hard, with shocks rippling up through PC sellers, the makers themselves, peripheral vendors and chip fabricators, to name only the most obvious. Microsoft tried to put a good gloss on the news by claiming that the delay was to enable them to improve the security of the system, but I don't think many people believed that. I only found one analyst prepared to accept that excuse, and he was pretty half hearted, giving the impression of a man clutching at straws. So what's the problem? Why are successive releases of Windows becoming further and further behind schedule? The answer is twofold. The underlying problem is one of complexity. The whole system is so complex that altering anything is likely to bring down the whole house. Partly this is bad design, but only partly. Microsoft employs some of the brightest software engineers I know, but their hands are tied by instructions from above not to separate out the different component of the system. The Internet Explorer (IE) browser was a case in point where the programmers had to integrate its functionality into the core of the operating system during the period running up to the anti-trust actions. The result is that every time a security flaw is found in IE it compromises the security of the entire system, and patches to fix IE have been known to bring down Windows itself. The second part of the problem lies in Microsoft's propensity for big bang launches, which means that, unlike other vendors, who tend to upgrade things incrementally, Microsoft likes to launch everything new in one package. As a result each new version includes massive quantities of new code, plus all the old code, because people's current applications use the existing code, making testing a nightmare. Vista has already had a number of major features ripped out in order to meet the three years late deadline. One has to wonder what else is going to be removed to make it ship in the new time slot. And that's not all. The new release of Microsoft Office - Office 2007 - has also been delayed as a consequence of the Vista delay. It's interesting to speculate what other delays might be in the works as the ripples spread. And Microsoft's response? It's reorganised its company structure once again. Anyone else interested in re-arranging the deck chairs? http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?c=1847854-7863277&brand=news&ds=5&fs=0
Since my last report Microsoft has added late shipping of Virtual Server to that of Vista and Office 2007. Like Vista, Virtual Server was supposed to ship at the end of this year. It is a product intended to compete with VMware and the open source Xen, allowing a single computer to be partitioned into multiple virtual machines. This delay means that Microsoft will have no competing product for at least another year. Not good. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/29/ms_virtual_delays/
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