They're looking to correct all 25% during the soon to be announced delay.
Microsoft chief says 80 percent chance new OS software will be available
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13812973/
Gates: Vista likely to be ready in January
Microsoft chief says 80 percent chance new OS software will be available
The Associated Press
Updated: 2:30 p.m. ET July 11, 2006
CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday
there was an 80 percent chance the company's next-generation operating
system, Windows Vista, would be ready in January
However, Gates said at a presentation in Cape Town to Microsoft software
partners that he would delay the launch if beta testing uncovered
shortcomings.
(MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)
The Vista software has been subject to a number of delays. Beta users of
software test products before their full commercial release in an effort to
uncover problems.
"We got to get this absolutely right," Gates said. "If the feedback from
the beta tests shows it is not ready for prime time, I'd be glad to delay
it."
He said Microsoft was investing $8 billion to $9 billion in developing Vista
and the company's next version of Office, its key cash-generator. He said
the company's software partners, in developing and adapting their own
products for the two launches, would invest 20 times as much as Microsoft.
Gates said he hoped the next version of Office would be ready in December.
In a separate speech Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer vowed that the
company's customers will never again face as long a wait between new
versions of Windows software as they're enduring now.
"I think it’s probably important for me to tell our partners that, rest
assured, we will never have a gap between Windows releases as long as the
one between XP and Windows Vista," Ballmer told thousands of Microsoft
product resellers and other clients at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner
Conference in Boston.
Ballmer tried to reassure customers that the wait will be worthwhile.
He said it was "fair" to say Vista has been a long time coming. But he also
called it "absolutely a blockbuster release."
Ted Schadler, an analyst from Forrester Research, said Ballmer was “selling
hard” in pledging shorter wait times for future versions of Windows.
“Microsoft’s business is built on developers, who build products and
applications that run on Microsoft Windows,” Schadler said. “He needs to
reassure these people that he’s not going to let them down again, and that
it’s worth it to switch to Vista.”
Schadler said Microsoft could make good on Ballmer’s pledge to shorten new
Windows version wait times by making more incremental improvements than the
company has promised in Vista.
“This time they really shot for the moon,” Schadler said.
The new Vista operating system will have speech and visual recognition tools
and be backed by strong security measures, he said. It would move away from
reliance on easy-to-crack passwords to greater reliance on visual
identification and software shields on Internet attacks.
World's largest market
The biggest market for these products soon will be China, Gates said. He
said China was already the world's No. 1 mobile phone market and he expected
it to be the world's top PC, broadband and software market within a few
years.
"Everybody needs to be in China," he said. "Even if only 20 percent of the
population is IT-active," he said, this is a huge number given the country's
1.3 billion population.
China's piracy of Microsoft software will decline, he predicted, as China
becomes a bigger producer of intellectual property and sees "it will benefit
as much as us" by implementing strong intellectual-property protection. He
expects the Chinese government — which accounts for what he said was 35
percent of the country's software sales — to buy all its software legally
this year.
Gates is in South Africa to attend a Microsoft-sponsored forum of government
leaders which gathers several African heads of state and former President
Clinton in debates on how technology can improve the continent's
competitiveness.
Gates and his wife, Melinda, also are visiting projects supported by their
philanthropic organization, which has invested billions of dollars to fight
diseases such as HIV-AIDS and malaria.
Shares of Microsoft dipped 8 cents to $23.42 in pre-market trading.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-11InnovationDay1UmbrellaPR.mspx
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,1987146,00.asp
"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!)"
