That Microsoft delay

Lots of commentary on the anouncement by Microsoft that Vista will be delayed again. Here, for example, is Good Morning Silicon Valley‘s take on it…

Microsoft is portraying Thursday’s shake-up of its Platforms & Services Division as a restructuring, months in the works, aimed at achieving “greater growth and agility” and unrelated to the repeated slippage in the release of Windows Vista, the latest announced this week (see “Don’t you know Lunar New Year is the new Christmas?”). And that may be true as far as it goes. But the problems with the OS may be much uglier than some tweaks needed here and there. Smarthouse News in Australia is citing “a Microsoft insider” saying Vista at this moment is a dog’s breakfast, with more than half its code needing to be rewritten. Smarthouse’s source says programmers and engineers are being pulled off the Xbox and Viiv teams to resolve problems with the entertainment and media center functions in Vista, and that both Vista and an updated Viiv would be targeted for release at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January….

Hmmm… That means that Vista will miss the 2006 Christmas market. It’s also been announced that the next release of Microsoft Office has been put back. But that’s probably because the folks at Redmond don’t want to steal Vista’s thunder by releasing Office 2007 before the new version of Windows. Clearly, running a bloatware-creating monopoly is not all fun and games…