Via PCWorld.com comes a report that Windows Vista might not be ready in January after all:

The operating system was due to be launched this year but in March the company said it wouldn’t get broad release until January 2007. Ballmer said Wednesday that the planned January launch may slip further based on feedback from a beta release program and the product road-maps of hardware vendors.

“We think we are on track for shipping early in the year. We’ve talked about the month, but we get a chance to critically assess all of the feedback we’ll get from this beta release then confirm or move [the launch date] a few weeks,” he said at a news conference in Tokyo.

We’ll see. Until we’re within the six-month window, I take any tentative date with a grain of salt.

The headline, of course, is an homage to the late, great Lowell George. The definitive version of “Easy to Slip” is on Little Feat’s 1972 release, Sailin’ Shoes. Sadly, it is not on Waiting for Columbus, which is possibly absolutely the greatest live album ever.

Over at ZDNet, I’ve put together a gallery of 30 screen shots digging deep into Vista Beta 2. I’ve dug up some stuff I guarantee you won’t see anywhere else.

For instance, there’s the new Performance Diagnostic Console, which is like Task Manager’s Performance tab on steroids.

If you’ve got questions about Vista Beta 2, post a comment here or in the Talkback section at ZDNet. I’ll do my best to follow up.

Over the weekend, a blog I had never heard of before (msblog.org) got a lot of publicity for passing along an unsubstantiated and highly questionable rumor that supposedly listed the retail prices that Microsoft is going to attach to Windows Vista.

According to this list, the prices of Windows Vista were going to be obscenely high, with typical prices of $500–1000. The list originally appeared on a German site and was picked up with no questioning by author Dennis Fraederich. Trouble is, it didn’t pass the smell test, with obvious errors and some internal problems that should have been obvious to anyone who looked at it for more than five seconds.

And now, the folks at msblog.org have simply deleted the contents of the original post, changing its headline to read “Post pulled due to public flaming.” The comments from readers are gone, too, available only to administrators of the site.

Now, there’s an interesting strategy. Get something wrong? Don’t correct it. Don’t retract it. Don’t apologize. Don’t respond to your critics. Just pull the post, hide the comments, and pretend it never happened, even though a few dozen other sites have already reprinted the bogus information and posted links to the original article.

Look, anyone can make a mistake. And it’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy to post something that appears to be a juicy scoop. But if you want to be taken seriously as a news source, you have to be willing to take your lumps when you get it wrong. Deleting the post is gutless and a complete disservice to your readers.

Am I going to listen to anything else these people have to say? No. Their credibility is now in negative territory.

InfoWorld’s Tom Sullivan:

In a report sure to make its customers glad they pay so much for consulting services, Gartner analysts went way out on a limb and said that Microsoft will miss its target shipping date for Windows Vista by one quarter. The analysts also said that “Microsoft can’t accurately predict [shipping dates] more than a few months out.” That last statement is probably fair, but if Microsoft can’t, how can Gartner?

Not to mention that Gartner has a really lousy track record with its predictions.

Thomas Lee has been a Windows beta tester for, oh, a gazillion years. His take on User Account Control (formerly User Account Protection, or UAP) is typical of longtime Windows users:

There are some other things about [build] 5365 I hate – particularly UAP. The concept of forcing users to run with relatively low privaleges is a great one. But the implementation is Vista is just plain lame. As I’m setting up the system, the entire screen goes black for 2-3 seconds (a visual sensation similar to what we saw when XP blue-screened) then a silly dialog box pops up – I click Accept – the screen goes black for another 2-3 seconds, and I can carry on. It’s very, very annoying – sufficiently so that I’m going to just log on with admin privaleges. It’s easier and far less intrusive. Sadly, while I like the concept, MS has made a poor job of the implementation. Of course, mileage may vary on this – but I doubt many IT Pros will even come close to liking this implementation. We’ll see.

I’ve published some screen shots of the latest UAC implementation at ZDNet. More to follow.

Am I the only person who’s actually happy about the mix of Windows Vista versions that Microsoft plans to offer next year? If you’re considering buying a new Windows PC, I believe your decision-making process will actually be simpler when Windows Vista hits the street than it is today. And if you’re planning to upgrade a PC you already own, you’ll find way more flexibility than you have with Windows XP.

I realize that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. One comment I read over and over again is that somebody looking for a new PC or a Windows upgrade has it so simple today, and those marketing morons at Microsoft are going to go screw it up for everybody by introducing all these confusing new packages. That conventional wisdom starts to break down the moment you look at it for more than about, oh, five seconds.

Last week I published a series of posts at ZDNet that address the widely held idea that Microsoft is making the biggest marketing blunder since New Coke by introducing too many versions. (I put together a table that clearly shows what’s in each version as well as two columns that explain the consumer features and the business features you’ll find in each upgrade.)

The core of the “Vista is too confusing” argument is that Vista has seven versions and XP only has two. Windows buyers will be paralyzed with indecision as they contemplate which version of Windows should go on their new PC. Oh, really? Look more closely.

Continue reading “Vista versions: maybe not so confusing after all” →