Robert McLaws ignites this thread on whether Vista’s ship date will need to be extended.
From the outside it’s really hard to tell if the October/January date is realistic. To me, it doesn’t seem like it, but how would I know? I have no idea how fast bugs are being turned around and I have no idea which troubled features can be dropped, hidden, ignored or fixed in time.
Microsoft has done an amazing job at times proving my intuition wrong when it comes to release dates. I wasn’t at all confident about Visual Studio 2005’s launch date, for instance. and Microsoft got it out the door in style.
All of this said, I have no problem with a January, March, or even June launch date. It makes no difference to me, other than each slip stalls the market that much longer. People start putting off purchases waiting for the “final” release and customers start migrating to betas which we as developers often can’t target our products for.
I also don’t have too much trouble with cutting/delaying even more features in order to reach an early launch date. To me, everything can be on the table. The SKUs, Media Center, WPF, or even my favorite Tablet bits. Not that any of these are holding things up–just that I wouldn’t mind separating and delaying them from a Vista OS launch if Microsoft had too. The one thing I would keep in “sync” with Vista is Office 2007. If Office comes later and it requires significant updates to the OS, I’d rather see the OS delayed until an Office install is clean. It’s too important of a product.