An interesting thing happened over the weekend in the blogosphere. I periodically read Robert Scoble's blog. Not because I'm some salivating wolf looking for that guy to hang himself. However, I will once or twice a week click the little link to his blog just to see if there is anything interesting. In case you haven't heard, it looks like the press, bloggers, MS employees... are all up-in-arms at Microsoft's announcement to delay the consumer version of Windows Vista until 2007. There was some, shall we say, slightly outlandish reports saying that some 60% of the user layer will be rewritten before Vista ships... huh? Scoble went on to out right attack the author, editor and the whole publication. This started what looked to be a maelstrom of points and counter points, finger pointing, and posturing. Scoble himself summarized the whole thing. Scoble seems to have realized that he stepped into quite a fresh pile. Now the knee-jerk reactions are flying all across the blogosphere. Even Scoble is getting into the act by asking folks to flame him... I doubt that's going to fix anything. Now he is being held up as a reason corporations should start having tighter controls over their bloggers with some set of seven rules for corporate bloggers. Is it just me, or have folks just gone off the deep end? Was anybody actually surprised that Microsoft delayed Vista? What is interesting is that it appeared that the ones most surprised were the folks inside Microsoft!
Move on folks... nothing to see here...
Cringely proposes the delay is marketing-imposed to allow the XBox to grab all of the Q4 shopping spotlight. That might explain why the MS insiders were caught off balance.
ReplyDeleteMy pal Roberto loves stepping in squishy stuff. He makes a dance of it. As to "having tighter controls over their blog", MS knew full well about him before hiring him (understatement alert!). Control Roberto? It's been tried before<lol>.
ReplyDeleteNot really, I have expected that since spring 2004. See my post in the b.p.d.non-technical newsgroup on 2004-04-14.
ReplyDeleteFor new PC sales at the end of the year MS will loose percentage points, while Mac will gain some percentages on the desktop, Linux gain some percentages on the server and Firefox gets some more browser user percentages.
<http://tinyurl.com/l7kv5>
which links to
<http://groups.google.com/group/borland.public.delphi.non-technical/msg/6619ac56b97af72a>
It also once again shows the world, that even though MS is so big and has access to so much resources, is no guarantee to its costumers that things will be delivered on time.
To Luigi
ReplyDeleteI think you are right that is better to delay that ship something unfinished. However this is not the first time Vista is delay rather it has been delay after delay, and fetaure cuts. Where is WinFS? In summary MS do not appear to have been in control of what they develop.