No one outside of the 98052 ZIP code seems to believe that Windows Vista is really going to ship when Microsoft says it will. The latest skeptical word is from Wall Street:
Where on the horizon is Vista?
Officially, Microsoft said last week that it is sticking to its most recently announced schedule of shipping Vista to business customers at the end of this year and launching it for consumers and on new PCs in January.
Few, though, are taking Microsoft at its word.
“Our estimates have already assumed a delay in the Vista launch to March or April,” Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund said in a research note Friday. [emphasis added]
Another slip in the schedule won’t be disastrous, but it will be embarrassing. My best guess – and that’s all it is, a guess – is that the next time Microsoft makes an official announcement about Vista’s schedule it will contain an actual release date. Better to suffer in silence for another few weeks (or more) than to make another vague pronouncement.
Ed Bott 
An actual date? How about April 1st.
Oh, well played, sir! Well played!
I’ve been a MS user since DOS 3.0, and I’m somewhat indifferent to Vista, but with my disappointing experience with OneNote 2007 beta and some Office flakiness, my eye is beginning to “wander across the room” to Mac machines.
Not committed yet, but I’m starting to read up on their products. (and no-the idea of having XP on another Mac partition hasn’t really swayed me) – it’s just time to take a look. With a Mac store just across the street from me now, it’s temptingly close!
Odd you should mention that.
My experience with OneNote 2007 beta has been so exceptionally good that it’s actually become, for me, the killer app that would keep me using Windows even if other platforms beckoned.
Different strokes for different folks.
I don’t think another slip would be disasterous, frankly. In fact, I’m REALLY suprised that no one is acutally commending MS to sticking with their guns and releasing the product when they bloody well feel like. Some of the Triple A games studios do it (e.g. interminable wait for HL2 and even id’s Doom), and for a core piece of software like your OS, this should be doubly true.
I don’t buy this whole “Well apple releasesd 5 versions of their OS in the time between XP and Vista” argument. From what I’ve heard, only very few improvements have been made, and in fact, their actual NextGen OS is going to be released as Leopard sometime during Apple’s WDC Con or whatever they have in August.
Truth be told, J. Allard’s comment on “There will never be such a long gap between OS releases”…”new release every 2 years..” kinda scares me. Should a core piece of software like the OS get re-writes as often as 2 years?? Imagine the poor sysadmins who’ll have to go through upgrade nightmares every 2 years?!! I think that would be a little ridiculous…but what do you guys think?