[LINK] Microsoft: Vista follow-up likely in 2009

[Glen Turner]

Howard Lowndes wrote:
> It seems that the Evil Empire have plans to torture us further.
> 
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070209/tc_infoworld/85937

> I like this bit, translate as "Why release all the features in one hit
> with only one revenue stream when you can achieve multiple revenue
> streams if you spread the feature releases out":
> ""We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when
> we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that
> we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in
> Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release.""

He's drunk the Kool Aid. Vista was a failed development project.

Its technical capabilities caught up with Linux, its graphical
interface caught up with MacOS.  What makes Vista a failure is
the sheer cost of the development project, which did nothing but
keep up with the competition. Compare the size of the Vista and
MacOS teams and compare the results, now convince me that Microsoft
is the software company, not Apple. Microsoft have failed at
one of its core competencies.

Until Microsoft face up squarely to this and address the problem
you've really got to question their operating systems business
unit's ability to execute any strategy. Fortunately for MS their
marketing people are very, very good at the moment and this is
compensating for their OS development failure.

According to Fathi development of Windows Xp SP2 was so draining
it halted progress on Vista, and you'll recall that Xp SP2
was shipped several years later than originally announced.
Not inspiring confidence that a Vista follow-on will be shipped
in 2.5 years.

Fathi's argument is that the technologies are now ready for
integration having been too immature for the original
Vista integration. I've got problems with that notion, as it
presupposes that the development team for the abandoned feature
wasn't redeployed to other tasks to make Vista ship sooner.