Column: So Vista Is Late--Yawn

Surprise, surprise—Microsoft's Windows Vista is shipping late. It's like deja vu. Quick, cancel Christmas.

Just like its predecessors, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows 95, Microsoft's first major new client operating system in more than five years will ship later than the date promised.

Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, explained on a conference call Tuesday that releasing Vista past October would be disruptive to the retail channel into the holiday-buying season.

“We wanted everyone in the industry to be ready for this, so we decided to move it out,” Allchin said.

No major features are being added or deleted, he promised, though he did say Microsoft wanted to make sure Vista is secure.

“As you know, safety and security has been something that has been a driving factor in this release all along,” Allchin said. Application compatibility and performance, however, are other issues Microsoft felt it would need the few extra weeks to hone in on, he added.

Clearly, this is not welcome news to partners and systems builders who target consumers and SMB customers, though the impact should be minimal, particularly on the SMB side, which would hardly be among the earliest of adopters.

"I don't know if it's even concerning to me," said John Tier, vice president of IS at Green Bay, Wis.-based VAR Connecting Point, which focuses on SMB customers.

He told me he was not at all surprised, and said it was in keeping with Microsoft's history of releases.

"We are largely in the SMB market, and we help them see the value of upgrading," Tier said. "If [Vista is' not there yet, they don't need it."

While just about every major upgrade from Microsoft has come to market through a similar pattern of delays—often time roiling the financial markets given the impact an OS would have on hardware upgrades—this time it's a different world. PC growth is declining, and no one ever saw Windows Vista as a catalyst that would change that dramatically.

And, lest we forget, only a handful of corporate buyers want to be earlier adopters of a new operating system. The masses prefer to watch others struggle with the changed configurations and potential unknowns of running a new OS before rolling it out themselves. In fact, most wait until at least a first service pack is released.

One very large enterprise customer who has been on the inside track of what was once called Longhorn (affectionately called “Laterhorn”) had forecasted 18 months ago that the first service pack would not be out until the end of 2007—meaning first half of 2008 deployment.

“I'm not shocked and no one who has been paying attention to Microsoft's history or has seen Vista is either,” the tester told me in an e-mail.

Of bigger consequence is this domino effect: “What does this do to SMS v4 and Longhorn Server RTM dates?” he asked. Hopefully, he added, key heads won't roll from this; if they were to replace coders, it would be like starting from scratch.

“No matter how good the documentation, you have to get into a coder's head to understand what it is before you change,” he wrote.

Of note, there is one change on the executive side: According to a Wall Street Journal report today, Steve Sinofsky, a senior vice president, will be named to head up the Windows division. That apparently was not related to the delay—Allchin had previously announced his intention to retire later this year, though he said on yesterday's call he will stick around till Vista is complete.

So, will Vista’s delay have an impact on consumer upgrades during the fourth quarter holiday-buying season? Probably. But Vista’s delay should not come as a big shocker. After all, Microsoft had been dropping very subtle hints that Vista was targeted toward the end of the year—to me, that means November or December—thereby already leading to tempered expectations for the holiday season.

Still, in a research note today, Goldman Sachs research analyst Rick Sherlund described the news as disappointing and somewhat surprising given the positive feedback of the February release of the Community Technology Preview (CTP); nonetheless, he did not change the rating of the company's stock. The next CTP, targeted at 2 million testers, is on schedule for release, Allchin said.

Who knows, maybe Microsoft should be lauded for making sure it doesn't rush Vista out before it's ready. Until then, I’ll try to stop yawning.

What do you think about this latest delay? Click on the TalkBack button below and start the discussion.

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