I’m all for MS delaying. I’d rather they get it right. Only a small minority care about the gee-whiz features; most people want to get things done.
Poorly managed companies that make lousy products make money all the time. It helps a lot in this case by being a monopoly. The number one thing that has kept MS alive all these years is that everyone else screwed up worse. Not the best business model to rely on.
Some very important notes:
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The businesses will be getting Vista early, but it will effectively be a beta. MS knows that businesses are more tolerant of applying patches that consumers. So that’s why the delay is focused on the consumer side. Vista is essentially a “Version 1.0” product and you should never be the first to try out a “Version 1.0” product.
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A lot of businesses will be hurt. PC makers and stores were relying on Vista as a sales booster for Xmas 2006. Since processor speeds and such are nearly flat, how are they going to convince people to buy new PCs this fall?
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[Well, a lot of pit-like flaming on why Vista is horrible would go here.]
“Hasta manana, Vista baby.”
What they know that keeps them on top was spelled out adequately in the Findings of Fact section of Justice Jackson’s anti-trust decision. You’ll recall the case was not thrown out on appeal based on the merits of the case against them, but the out-of-court behavior of the judge.
And yet you argue that Microsoft knows how to give people what they want? 
IMO, Vista will be Microsoft’s last hurrah (when I build my next box, I’m going to be sure to make it dual-boot, Linux and Windows). MS’s continued dominance for at least the last ten years has been due to their ability to use their monopoly power to turn off partners’ ability to make profits, giving them the incentive to give the cold shoulder to MS rivals, cutting them out of the market. Again, it’s all in the court decision.
Their new rivals, however, either do not rely on the Windows platform to function (Google et. al., who have their own established market and are beginning to make noise about expanding into the OS field, and even Apple, who, based on their new client base from the iPod, have sold many times more Mac Minis than the total number of Windows Media Center PCs), or are not profit-motivated (the open source community), and therefore immune to Microsoft’s machinations.
I’ve long maintained that as soon as people have an option that permits the possibility that they will not have to recreate or abandon legacy documents, platform will cease to be an issue. OpenOffice is at last making great inroads in this direction, with the backing of a number of well-established companies who may help it overcome shyness about new software.
The mind boggles at what seems to be Microsoft belieiving they are operating on the same playing field they used to be. The mind further boggles at the notion that anyone still regards them as the great white hope of desktop computing. If Vista turns out to be as big a turkey as all the signs are pointing to, it will be the end of the Microsoft mystique.
What you are seeing in my posts is my simple shock that a company with Microsoft’s resources consistently behaves so incompetently.
For the reasons mentioned in my previous post, I’m surprised Microsoft believes they can allow themselves this much Babbage’s Law leeway in the face of a market that has more choices than they used to.
Choices are only good when they are viable alternatives.
I can buy a German car or an Asian car or an American car. I know that my choice not withstanding, I can pull up to any pump and refill the car without pump/fuel incompatibility. I know that any corner garage can sell me tires, change my oil, change my wipers and add windshield washer fluid.
When I can’t access a file on shared drive the same way or with the same level of success from a Mac O/S or Linux as from a Windows O/S, I have a problem due to my choice of platform and O/S. When that file is work related and I need to work remotely, I have an even more pressing problem. So what good is choice?
And anyway, in a couple of years Vista will be as stable as XP is these days and in a few years after that people will be bitching out the next generation of O/S from Microsoft or whoever comes along to challenge them.
The problem is not necessarily because of your choice. The problem may be that that the server on which the shared file lives may be sharing that file using a protocol that is not standard, not open, and not documented, and that the guys who wrote the server software may have had to reverse engineer the protocol, because the guys who invented the protocol won’t tell anyone how it works.
This (any many other examples, such as office document formats, modifications to authentication protocols and suites such as Kerberos and LDAP) ensures vendor lock in so that things will “just work”.
Spyware suites were mentioned earlier. I feel compelled to point out that auto-installing spyware is only possible if security holes (large security holes) exist in an operating system. There is pretty much no known Linux spyware, and very little Mac OSX spyware.
Internet availability was also mentioned. Unix and Linux have had TCP/IP networking since the 1970s (well, Linux since it was written in the early 90s). Windows has included it since Windows for Workgroups 3.11, released in 1992. Windows’ initial TCP/IP stack was lifted (legally) from the BSD operating systems - it was open source code.
A feature comparison between Windows, Mac OSX and Linux would be unlikely to leave Windows in the lead.