Gates Admits To Possible Vista Delays

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It has been a fun 24 hours for Microsoft. First it is slammed (well, gently tickled) by a 280.5m euro fine then Gatesy has to admit there are further doubts surrounding Vista’s release date.

Speaking at a forum in South Africa the retiring head was forced to admit additional testing means there is now an “80 per cent chance” of Vista hitting its January launch. Industry cynic that I am I’d call that a 20 per cent chance of delay which in Microsoftian terms mean a 99.9 per cent chance they’ll ‘stretch’ it first to February then ‘ease’ it into late March.

Of course Billy went on to prattle about how his company would take no risks with the last OS he will see at the helm which again means: we’re running late. He said costs for developing Vista and the similarly much delayed Office 2007 suite would total around $9bn by their completion in 2009 (I made that last bit up).

What WG failed to explain of course is how a next generation operating system shorn of the vast majority of its original innovations such as WinFS possibly run so wildly out of control? It’s like me saying I’m going to clean my flat over the weekend, then changing that to vacuuming the bedroom carpet, then just sticking to the dishes, then simply licking a plate clean of its chocolate sauce before saying “Monday? Already?! Well, I dunno… I was so pushed for time.”

Link:
Microsoft UK

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