There’s been a bit of a brouhaha going on between Microsoft blogger Scoble and some never-heard-of-them Australian site with articles here and here. I don’ t know Smarthouse, but Squash has a nice piece on the journalist at the center of the storm.
If you have an hour to kill and masochistic tendencies, punch through the Scobelizer link above and read the 100+ comment conversation. The gist of it all seems to be this:
Its been what, five years plus, since Windows XP came out? It was just the latest in a long line of over-promised, over-hyped OS updates from Bill and gang. Security issues have only gotten worse, it seems. I do think that this release, with all the patches and tinkering updates, is finally reliable enough that most Windows users don’t have to reboot multiple times per day. But, you know, that’s a pretty low target to shoot for with the bazillion bucks Microsoft spends on R&D.
How is it that Apple has been able to release four or five major updates to OS X since XP came out? And it seems decently likely that that 10.5 will be out before Vista sees the light of day. Oh, and they also managed to change the music and entertainment business in the same time frame. All of that on an R&D budget that has Wall Street wringing its collective hands.
But underneath all of this discussion over the ridiculous assertion that after five years of development, Microsoft has to rewrite 60% of the Vista code, there is some fun stuff in this thread for those of us who can generally care less about Microsoft. Buried in that long Scobelizer comment thread, he says that Microsoft clearly can’t rewrite Windows from scratch at this point because it would screw up backward compatibility and “you’d see Apple’s market share double overnight.” Heh heh.
The final word on this will be easy. After all the other delays, is this the final delay? Can Microsoft actually ship a good product by the new January deadline? If Vista is just another piece of blubbery software with all the same security issues, or it comes later than the new January deadline, perhaps Microsoft will spend a bit more time worrying about their internal credibility issues and less time chasing down every silly negative story that hits the wire.
