. . . vapour-ware in the morning!

The longer they delay release, the less people will be willing to forgive any bugs. trying to make it "perfect" first time out may end up biting them worse than a version needing the typical windows patches right away.

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"Rest assured, we will never have a gap between Windows releases as long as the one between XP and Windows Vista."

I don't know about you guys, but I feel so much better now that monkeyboy has provided this reassurance.

I have 3 words for you: "I LOVE THIS COMPANY!"

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zewazir wrote:
The longer they delay release, the less people will be willing to forgive any bugs. trying to make it "perfect" first time out may end up biting them worse than a version needing the typical windows patches right away.

Not in the long term. "The typical windows patches" thing is exactly the kind of image they want to get away from. If they release Vista full of bugs then people will dismiss Vista as just another buggy Windows. Of course the reality is that it will have bugs that need patching and that is just the nature of software development. Especially when we're talking about what may be the largest and most complex software product on Earth. It's fun to give M$ alot of crap, but it ain't easy to make something of that magnitude! But hey that's what they get for not controlling the hardware configurations.

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Biff wrote:
Of course the reality is that it will have bugs that need patching and that is just the nature of software development.

That is my point. No matter how long they delay the release, Vista WILL have to be patched. So they face the reaction of "We waited THIS LONG, and it STILL needs to be patched?!?"

Few people understand just what an undertaking it is to write a virtually new operating system that will work with a wide variety of processors, hardware, peripherals, etc. All they see is the old Windows was released and needed patches. The current windows was released, and needed patches. The NEW windows will FINALLY get released, after suffering delay after delay, and IT NEEDS PATCHES!

As you say, it's a reality of software development. But it still could be a PR nightmare.

Please, don't make excuses for Window's unmanagebility and bloatware.

OK, so all software needs patches, but MS is regarded differently. People who use Windows actually are frustrated at having to endure more patches -- and in batches that often are intended to fix other patches.

I actually like that Windows seems unmanageable to MS, leading to this current delay. It is only poetic justice for this predatory monopoly which, by the way, the Gates Foundation continues to extend by refusing to endow individuals and organizations with OSes other than Windows. People need to tell Warren Buffet that his so-called gift to the Foundation shold be given conditionally. The condition should be that Gates give away Macintosh and Linux OSes, not just Windows and later Vista.

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Biff wrote:
Especially when we're talking about what may be the largest and most complex software product on Earth.

I keep hearing people say this, but in what way is Vista larger and more complex than OS X or Linux? From what I've seen of Vista - it has less features than OS X 10.2!! The only complexity I can imagine is due to it being poorly written software - not through it breaking new ground in functionality/performance.

Most likely referring to the need to support so many iterations of hardware. Driver support alone must be a nightmare for the developers.

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Steve Ballmer, the company's CEO, is promising that future versions of windows will come faster.

The only way I see this happening is if they fire 50% of the team working on the OS. Microsoft is as bloated as their software, and only by trimming off the fat on the former can they do the same on the latter.