Sources at the company told me this week that Microsoft will soon delay the release of Windows Vista Beta 2 from December 7, 2005 to sometime in January or February 2006. However, because the Vista development schedule is extremely time constrained, the company will try and make up lost time by eliminating one of the planned release candidate (RC) milestones that were planned for later in the process.
Microsoft hitting delays now on Windows Vista is exactly what the company is trying not to do. One of its number one goals is to ship faster, and missing milestones now is going to make Vista less feature rich, stable and secure when it ships. It’s too bad that the company is so large and vast, because now it’s being forced to do something it hasn’t had to do before, focus as much on the development of the "Windows Internet", as it does it’s own operating system.
It just seems like the predicted software consolidation era has left Microsoft in a position to be so vast and so overwhelming that it’s getting tougher for it to focus on anything at all. To make matters worst, Microsoft needs to catch on and counter what ever database-Ebay type of market cap building monster Google has lurking just beneath radar.
I do think Microsoft has hashed out a rough plan which could end up working. By leveraging Microsoft’s next web based protocols and making the difference between web and OS less obvious but more cooperative and also splitting up its OS’s offerings as mandated; Microsoft will be enabling so much in it’s operating system and presenting to developers a hard to pass up write-once combined platform. You combine that with what’s going into the living room this Christmas, Microsoft might be just about everywhere in a year, throw a few text advertisements into that and you could see the stock price go up a bit. Do you think the PS3 could overcome an XBOX 360 that is sold for 100 dollars right before it went on sale?
GeekSpeaker 