Despite claims by Microsoft during a conference call this week that Windows Vista is on schedule, a presentation given to partners just last month shows otherwise.
On October 7, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a keynote speech to a group of partners in Ireland. Included in that meeting was a presentation by Maurice Martin, developer and platform group lead at Microsoft Ireland, that included a slide showing the Windows Vista Beta 2 slotted for a December 2005 release.
The slide also shows that the final release of Windows Vista is slated for summer of 2006. The presentation was called "Marketing Plans and Overview FY06."
Background
On Tuesday, Microsoft held two conference calls, one with developers and one with media and analysts, to discuss the progress of Vista, the engineering process used to develop the client operating system, and the community technology previews (CTP) used to gather feedback.
During the call Amitabh Srivastava, a corporate vice president in Microsoft's Windows unit, said Microsoft had not announced publicly what the Beta 2 shipment date would be.
"At this point we are not making any announcements on what the date for Beta 2 will be," he said. "Beginning early next year we will be making more announcements and telling you more about when to expect the beta to be out."
The statements conflict with what Microsoft was telling partners just last month. Srivastava also said the general availability for Vista would be in the second half of 2006, which appears to be a wavering on the summer 2006 commitment.
Microsoft's business customers may have come to expect delays in product releases, but the company is under pressure over the next year to deliver its Vista OS on time.
Significance
The fact that Microsoft made its December and summer statements to partners is significant, observers say.
"We are awfully late in the process [of developing Vista] for there to be uncertainty in the dates, at least for the partners," says Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst for Jupiter Research. "If you are developing software or building computers, you kind of need to know where Vista is and where it is going to be. Yesterday's call created more uncertainty than ever [as to] where Vista is."
Wilcox also says the uncertainty is significant for corporate users. He says that the corporate world is at the tail end of a major upgrade cycle that has big businesses making buying decisions now.
"A December Beta 2 would have been a strong indication of a potentially earlier release of Vista, and for some businesses maybe a reason to wait longer on those upgrades. From my perspective, it is like NASA trying to launch a rocket to the moon; you have a launch window, and Microsoft missed the window with Vista."
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