Sorry. Couldn't resist stealing that in light of the Vista delay into next year.

Timing of the news was funky. Vista was declared not-quite-ready for its planned holiday debut just days after Microsoft launched its much-ballyhooed, half-a-billion-dollar "People Ready" ad campaign. That prompted one irreverent Microsoftie to suggest the above headline.

Ba-doom-boom

One might bet there will be some changes in the Server & Platforms group co-headed by Allchin and Kevin Johnson.

Microsoft's teleconference Tuesday squashed any news coming out of its Mix06 show. You gotta feel sorry for Allchin, the platform & servers guru who's put his heart and soul into this release and has pegged his retirement to its shipment.

The delay was attributed, in part, to customer and partner demand for a clear availability date. It is true, as a Microsoft exec asserted, that January has become a huge retail month as people shop for bargains, but there's no way to spin missing the holiday buying season as a good thing.

One northern Californian partner, when told Microsoft attributed its decision to parnter input, scoffed.

"Tell me again why we it's in our interest to put off the new business: deploying Vista, doing server upgrades, migrations and consolidations? How is it that's in our interest to wait when the delay will cause customers to wait for the new release," he said via e-mail.

"Software companies can measure their financial losses when a major release is delayed, especially in competitive markets where they lose share as a function of the length of the delay. Now we're being told that the same delay that will cause a loss to Microsoft is beneficial to us. Not unless we're selling solutions based on something else besides Windows, like Linux or Solaris 10 x86," he noted.