A two-sentence post from research firm Gartner has caused some uproar in the technology world, as Gartner researchers claim Microsoft will miss its release of Vista by three months, pushing it back into 2007.
“Microsoft’s track record is clear; it consistently misses target dates for major operating system releases. We don’t expect broad availability of Windows Vista until at least 2Q07, which is nine to 12 months after Beta 2,” said the teasing entry posted at Gartner’s website.
Reuters cited an excerpt from Gartner’s research note, where the analysts claimed “Microsoft still wants to get it out as soon as possible, but slipping from January to March is nowhere near as bad as slipping from shipping before the holidays to after the holidays.”
Microsoft has denied it will miss the launch dates. “We remain on track to deliver Windows Vista Beta 2 in the second quarter and to deliver the final product to volume license customers in November 2006 and to other businesses and consumers in January 2007,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Despite the denial, numerous responses to the report that Microsoft could again push back the oft-delayed launch of Vista, its next generation operating system and a core piece of the company’s revenue stream, have found their way online.
Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s well-known corporate blogger, posted that while he isn’t going to try predicting a ship date, he doesn’t have any reason to doubt Microsoft’s denial of Gartner’s report.
“I’d rather pressure the Windows team to get it right, and don’t ship unless it’s ready,” Scoble wrote.
ZDNet’s Microsoft Report blogger Ed Bott wrote that Gartner misses things almost as much as Microsoft does:
I’ve lost count of the number of times Gartner has been off with similar predictions….Gartner’s crack analysts, working hand in hand with Microsoft also were the first to report that Microsoft’s enterprise server products would be released in late 2001 under the name Windows 2002. Oops. They got that right except for the name and the date.
Other sources have echoed Gartner’s contention that a three-month wouldn’t cause any real issues, since Microsoft will miss the August back to school sales as well as late-year holiday sales, to the dismay of their OEM partners like Dell.
Microsoft is in the driver’s seat, of course, so if they do delay Vista by three months, or even longer (it has been about five years now), will it really matter? Only if a few Fortune 500 companies switch en masse to Mac or Ubuntu Linux alternatives instead.
Now that would certainly spur Microsoft along, wouldn’t it?
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
