Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told a group of South African partners that there is an 80 percent chance that Windows Vista will still launch in January 2007. Since Microsoft announced last month that Office 2007 was not likely to make the January launch date, Microsoft's Vista team has been evaluating whether to delay the launch of Vista, as well, sources say. Many testers say they are doubtful that Vista will be of sufficient quality for the product to go to manufacturing this fall. Speaking of Vista, Microsoft also announced on July 11 at the Worldwide Partner Conference that more than 200 customers are now deploying Vista Beta 2 in production. (A scary prospect, from what we've heard from testers about Beta 2!)