Joe, its obvious to me you are living in 1996. The days of NT 4 and disparately waiting for the Service Pack are over. Since the introduction of Windows Update and pervasiveness of the Internet particularly in the release of Windows 2000, it has begun to phase out the necessity of waiting for the first Service Pack approach before making mass deployments or putting a new OS in production. Yes, Service Packs are inevitable and what you are getting now through Windows Update in Vista today is mostly what you will be seeing in SP1 for Vista; a collection of bug fixes, security updates and likely better support for hardware like 802.11n based products for example.

[i]Some businesses might take the renewal plunge based on Windows 7 estimated delivery. Some advice: You don't bet on Microsoft ship dates, you bet against. Remember, for example, that Vista missed holiday 2006, which is simply unthinkable. [/i]

In the case of businesses, they did not miss any ship date. For Company's with SA and EA or even MSDN, they had access to Windows Vista and Office 2007 on November 30th. Consumers didn't get it until a month later. Big differences there Joe.

What about R2?

Its coming! Unless you are referring to a Vista R2 client, Microsoft never promised or confirmed any. They did say a Windows "Server" 2008 R2 (formerly Longhorn R2) would be available in 2009.

Please read Mary Jo's latest post on "Drawing more on Microsoft roadmaps".
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=593

Joe- why about a product 3 years out?
Because they're telling the market, they can't do it till the VCSY lawsuit is over!

Microsoft hit with patent suit from Vertical Computer

By John Letzing
Last Update: 4:57 PM ET Apr 20, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) Vertical Computer Systems Inc. said late Friday it has sued Microsoft Corp. for allegedly infringing a patent related to computer application generation.

Sponsored by:
VCSY0.03, +0.00, +8.7%) said in a prepared release that the suit was filed April 18 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Vertical Computer said in the release that Microsoft's .NET system violates a patent Vertical Systems filed in 1999, and awarded in 2004, covering "a system and method for generating computer applications in an arbitrary object framework."

Anyone who counted right now on Windows 7 coming out in 3 years would have to be foolish.
I don't believe I'm being cynical: Release dates slip more often than not, from Microsoft especially, and 3 years is an awful long time for it to slip. I wouldn't be surprised to see it in 4 years at least.
Ask yourself: If they release it 3 years from today, will you be surprised or not?
I will.

I believe Microsoft knows that the perception of Vista (by consumers and therefore by the industry) is that it's a mediocre upgrade from XP. They have to generate some excitement about a version of Windows that people will actually want to buy. As we all know, SPs from Microsoft contain very few new features and mostly are just things that should have been corrected in the gold version but weren't for whatever reason (I'm looking at you slow, piece of cr** Vista file copy!) Talking about an SP isn't going to fix the perception in the marketplace.

What really blows me away is that it seems we've left an age where the titans in the industry are unable to deliver on the whizbang features that we need. People should really be asking Microsoft why they weren't able to deliver WinFS and some of the other incredibly useful features that were promised in the original Longhorn PDC version. I understand that complexity adds risk to any project but with all of the developer talent that Microsoft has in house, why couldn't they deliver? In my mind, it all adds up to an ominous harbinger of things to come from Microsoft. The product is just too big and complex for them to handle....even with their billions in R&D. That makes me skeptical that they'll ever deliver a product as revolutionary as the jump from Win3.x to Win95 again.

Their day may have passed.

Maybe the WinDos7 department is trying to drive the VisDuh department out of business. MS will have a new system out in 3 years? Fantastic - I'll stick with XP until then. Then again I might just ditch the lot because those 3 years might stretch into 5. What crowd are they catering to? The "oh, look, MS have just released a new clippy!" mob?

Joe;

You put your heart into this article and it shows, though I am betting on black, black meaning that Microsoft will not be able to get the next version out in three years, I am gonna go long on you and here's why...

Microsoft has failed in the last 5 years to bring anything practically out on time from their original "release dates" and therefore, I go long.

Also my friend, Microsoft WILL announce in the PDC (period thereof) that they will have some wizbang smoke and mirrors or the Bill Gates' Dog and Pony Show on what makes Windows 7 so damned atractive like Him and say, Steve Ballmer did with WinFS. Of course, this like WinFS WILL fail, DOOMED to fail as pathedically as the WinFS concept -- Oh by the way, WinFS was something I REALLY would of loved to seen included in the ever-so-high cost of Vista.

But I degress, you've heard it all before. Just remember this, your money is asure betting on black, betting against Microsoft.

Besides anyone betting on or with or for Microsoft in these matters reminds me of a Junior Cheerleader giving out some face time, if you know what I mean, under the bleachers during the county fair in the midwest somewhere. So to help you avoid the bad taste in your mouth, look once more at the lackluster performance of the history of the Microsoft Slip record.

What we have here with the "new" release of Windows Vienna (renamed 7) is marketing hype, not PR. Its designed for those who are waiting to see if Vienna/7 will be any better than Vista, to see that they are going have to wait an extra year. So they had better buy Vista, that is at least MS hope.

In one of Joe Willcox earlier articles, he stated that he thought MS would set release dates that they could meet or even beat. This is a way of doing this by setting the release date for Vienna/7 later, and to get more people buying into Vista.

One has to wonder why MS has to rename all its products, and can never, it seems, find a name that they are satified with from the first? Also, one has to wonder about the pointless GUI changes introduces in Vista and Office 2007, that most users never wanted.

Do believe Ballmer this time when he said that they would never go this far again between versions of Windows releases. In the case of Vienna/7, or whatever the finial version will be called, it needs to comes out soon, as MS has so far dropped the ball as far as Vista.

A lot of you fail to understand what happened with Longhorn during the initial phase of its development. If you only how to bash Company officials, you are likely to be 1% computer literate.

The initial codebase Vista (Longhorn) was being built upon (Windows XP) was just not feasible to accomplish the development and support the weight of the various technologies Windows Developers were adding to it and building on top of it. WinFS was one of these. Because they had to reset the project in August of 2004, WinFS took a big hit. They decided to use a much stronger code base based on Windows Server 2003 SP1 code. To get WinFS working properly again would have required too much time and resources. Time especially since two years had already passed into the project development. Maybe if they had kept it into the scope and chose to disappoint customers instead, Vista with WinFS would be RTMed now.

Microsoft still managed to deliver other technologies (Pillars) that were promised initially, such as Windows Presentation and Communication Foundation (formerly Avalon and Indigo), .NET 3 (WinFX).

Chips, why don't you do some actual research before making unfounded statements? Office 2007 core apps featuring the Office Fluent are not pointless. The new enhanced UI solves a real problem, interface clutter and improves productivity in areas of accessibility and ease of use in addition to new features for creating better looking documents, managing and finding trends in data using new business intelligence tools. The interface is much easier to use as I noted, files created with the new XML format are much smaller than their binary predecessors. I know you are jealous because OpenOffice and KOffice will never achieve the same level of superiority in features and ease of use as Office 2007. And it does not have the luxury to copy Office Fluent because its patented and if they do they have to pay some royalty because its a competing product. Even Office 97 makes Office productivity tools on Linux feel, look and act like something out of 1992.

As for Windows 7, I predict it will be on time or probably even earlier than Microsoft's projected target date. If they plan on using the latest codebase then they will be just fine. Microsoft has made numerous changes to their development processes to deliver products to market much faster, secure and of course stable. Don't use third party device driver developer complaints either as an excuse for bugginess in Vista. Not because Vista has raised the quality bar in areas such as driver singing, no kernel mode drivers, patch guard and UAC means they have a right for their lack of moving with the times.

As for codenames Chip, thats what they are "codenames". It is used internally until a more appropriate name is chosen when its ready to be marketed. They are not meant to be logical or necessarily inviting but more to define the status of the project itself. Windows 3.1 was Janus, Windows 95 was Chicago, 98 Memphis, these are examples of codenames Microsoft has used for many years, not something strange or new. Even Apple use codenames to define their latest releases (Tiger 10.4), Leopard - 10.5.

I don't see how selling 60 million licenses for Vista over the past quarter for Vista could be dropping the ball Chips. The basically tripped the Mac OS X usebase in a matter of months. Where is Linux in all this - 0.1% as usual and depressed.

To Andre Da Costa :

You Sir and a lot of MS bloggers like to use a link in your name to promote your websites. I have seen a lot of these lately in the comments from people who are "just your average users," but are running 100% pro MS websites that also contain a lot of FUD as well. LOL. Oddly enough, your site is almost entirely about Vista, and being very pro-microsoft. Its even hosted by live.com, which is Microsoft own domain. Which can checked out very easy at whois.domaintools.com Just plug in his link address.

Everything really is about MS on your site, are you sure you really are not owned by them?

Which I why I will not respond to your FUD.

You chose to take the lame road when it comes to responding. Not because I chose to have blog about Microsoft products, particularly Vista because its something I use everyday and I want to share my experiences with it and also learn from others at the same time. I have been watching the development of Vista (Longhorn) for a long time now and I decided to start a blog covering its development since late 2004.

My blog is not owned by Microsoft - I just want to make that very clear.

To Andre Da Costa :

Quote; "My blog is not owned by Microsoft - I just want to make that very clear."
---------------------------------------------------

Yea right. Tell your Masters at Redmond, if they send me a nice Acer Laptop like they did back about a year ago for all the online bloggers when Vista came out, that I will stop writting the truth about them.

On second thought, make that 2 Thinkpads laptops (T60P) with Linux on them, as I don't want to waste time formatting over Vista. LOL. I can be bought.

I made it clear its from Microsoft. So my integrity is not compromised and I have spoken fairly about Vista running on it (good and bad).

To Andre:

I'm sorry if I don't have any sympathy for a company with hundreds and thousands of dev staff, billions of dollars in their coffers that are able to be used for development, and seemingly endless resources to make things happen. If I promised my customers a much needed feature in a future version of my product but then failed to deliver with the rationale of "It was just too hard. My original code base wasn't working and I had to start from scratch so you don't get that shiny, cool feature that would have really benefited you", I'd fully expect to have them begin looking elsewhere for their needs. Failing to deliver a promised feature is not an option for any software company. Either don't promise or make it happen. Those are the only two possible outcomes. I know broken promises happen all the time in the industry but as consumers, we shouldn't tolerate this. I know I don't make promises or even hint at future features in my software unless I know for a fact that I can make them work in the time given. And I couldn't imagine using the excuse, "My original codebase was just not going to work" -- who cares? That's my problem not the customers. Why should they suffer (by not getting features they need/want) because of my poor architecture and forethought?

You're being way too forgiving of Microsoft's inability to deliver here. At the very least, Microsoft should deliver WinFS in a service pack (if time and complexity was the issue, then they've had nearly a year to complete it!) but they've completely dropped the subject.

To Andre Da Costa AKA Redmond WA.

Dear Mr. MS Shrill your snap judgement about your original article shows you are indeed the 1% you complain about. Also I have only one question in two parts if you can follow along.

1.) Do you have Microsoft tattooed on the inside of your lip? and if not, it is on your backside?

And last but not least, a quote from my original post certainly comes to mind after reading your mindless FUD and that is this...

"Besides anyone betting on or with or for Microsoft in these matters reminds me of a Junior Cheerleader giving out some face time, if you know what I mean, under the bleachers during the county fair in the midwest somewhere. So to help you avoid the bad taste in your mouth, look once more at the lackluster performance of the history of the Microsoft Slip record."

I suggest Mint Listerine to get the taste out of your mouth in the meantime.

Jason, you are not a developer, you are a wannabe. The state at which Microsoft presented Longhorn to the world in October of 2003 was ALPHA, it was not even at BETA 1 stage which ultimately would prove anything in it would be subject to change. Longhorn continued being in Alpha state even at WinHEC 2004.

WinFS was more than just fix you drop in a Service Pack. You obviously don't know anything about software development. WinFS required huge amounts of testing, especially from third party developers to get their applications working right with the Data Store. To start testing that over again would have required too much of third party developers and Microsoft time when there was so much more in Longhorn that could have been delivered on time and thats exactly what happened.

The only thing Microsoft did not deliver in Vista is WinFS and PC Syncing. When software is in testing (BETA) certain features are always subject change. Even Apple and Open Source developers know that, it boggles me why you can't. Stacks in Leopard was originally promised as a feature of Panther (Piles), but it did not make it in.

Douglas, you are not worthy of a decent response.

Damn Andre, can't you try to be less obvious about being paid off by Redmond? It's no use for MS to bribe bloggers if they're all as useless for underground marketing as you.

Andre:
Well, I guess I succeeded in getting you to show your true colors.

You may call me a "wannabe" developer but I'd say you're part of the problem in the software development industry: broken promises and late delivery. Forgive me for being responsible in not promising something that I am not 100% sure can be delivered to my customers.

Mr. Andre, you missed the mark here, IHMHO.

J.