An anonymous Microsoft employee who calls himself "Mini-Microsoft" demanded in a March 21 blog post: "Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!" His frustration over the Windows Vista delay led to more than 500 comments on the subject, many of them coming from Microsoft employees who also vented their anger anonymously.
"Vistais deployment is going to come from people buying CPUs with the OS pre-installed, not dancing down the CompUSA aisle as they clutch that boxed version of Vista to their loving chest," Mini-Microsoft wrote. "So not only did we miss last yearis opportunity, weire missing this yearis opportunity, too.
"With the convergence of high-tech media, this holiday season would have been an explosive nodal point to get Vista out for a compounded effect."
While most of the comments agreed with him, one visitor stopped by to say: "If you had spent the last 5 years of your life grinding away to get this thing out the door, you would have realized the only thing worse than slipping the date, would have been to lay a turd in August ... weill be living with the Vista codebase for a long, long time. This is the right thing to do for the product ... At the end of this year, do you want Vista? Or do you want XP SP2 ME?"
On March 27, Mini-Microsoft followed up with a post in which he explained his rationale for the earlier diatribe: "Iim extremely passionate about Microsoft for doing this blogging intervention to put it back on track and live up to its potential." He also said that he raised the bar for comment approval, noting: "Iim just plain not interested in hosting your anti-Microsoft negativity."
Two days later, he opted for "a bit of a blog break [to] let things cool down here."