Microsoft likely to ship Vista on time: analyst
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Microsoft Corp.  will most  likely ship its upcoming Windows Vista operating system on time  and meet its deadline for both corporate and retail consumers,  a Wall Street analyst said on Wednesday.
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(InfoWorld) - As Microsoftâs five-year-long development effort slouches toward completion, details began to emerge last week that showed the company is (finally) gearing up to release Windows Vista after the new year, as promised. Pricing information popped up on a Canadian Web site, and Amazon.com told visitors that the new OS would be going out on Jan. 30, only to replace that date with a squishier âEarly 2007.â Finally, by the time you read this, Microsoft has promised to release the penultimate test version of its Vista operating system, dubbed âRelease Candidate 1â to an army of testers around the world. Are anticipatory chills running down your spine? They shouldnât be. Because a Release Candidate must be stable enough to allow corporate buyers to evaluate the product for deployment, Microsoft will have done quite a bit of work to RC1 over Vistaâs previous beta incarnations; so get set for a number of improvements. On the other hand, because of this concentration on stability, donât look for any noteworthy new features. Hereâs what Vista RC1 will likely have to offer: Installation: A late beta release dubbed âPre RC1â received kudos from more than one online reviewer for the improvements in this area, and rumors out of Microsoft say RC1 is the first version of Vista (or any Windows version) that has seamlessly installed on a variety of new notebooks and desktops â no muss, no fuss, and with full detection of PC Card and USB peripherals. Graphical interface: Aero has reportedly given Microsoft quite a few Advil moments, and even Beta 2 users were reporting intermittent difficulties. Look for this to be smoothed out in anything that receives RC status. That doesnât mean, however, that you should try to run it on your anemic graphics subsystem from 2003. Microsoft recommends at least 32-bit-per-pixel graphics capability. To you and me that means that for really smooth Aero-nautics, you should have a DirectX 9-capable 3-D accelerator card with 128MB of dedicated video RAM. If your test box lacks this video muscle, RC1 will support a non-Aero interface for weaker or older PCs. Audio: Microsoft has been having trouble with audio in even its most recent Vista Beta release. Toolsmixer controls are intermittently absent, and audio playback is often interrupted or missing. This should be solved in an RC1 release. If youâre a systems or network administrator, RC1 wonât be much different from Beta 2. The new release will ship with Internet Explorer RC1 installed, but even that has few differences from IE7 Beta 2. There will be a new, easier-to-use integrated backup tool, but itâs of little interest to corporate users whoâll most likely be using a centralized third-party app or Windows Shadow Copy. The pricing and availability info â coupled with the OSâs slow march toward âgold,â aka a finished version of Windows Vista ready for manufacturing â shows that Microsoft is serious about meeting its ship date. However, the key criterion for Vista RC1 will be stability. If it installs smoothly, runs smoothly, and gives us the full Vista experience that Microsoftâs been promising, consider it a success. If not, itâs back to the drawing board.
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To get next version of Windows out on time, company to delay some planned features, sources say.
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Microsoft will releaseWindows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1)&#160;on Monday, Feb. 4, according to reports Friday from Tech ARP.com, a Malaysian Web site.Vista SP1 will make RTM on Monday, said Tech ARP, with computer makers receiving media later in the week to install the updated operating system on new laptops and desktops. Bits will also be posted for download on Monday, the site claimed.&quot;Microsoft will be deploying SP1 in two &#39;waves,&#39;&quot; said Tech ARP. The first, on Monday, will include just five of the 36 available language packs -- English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. The second wave, slated for one to two weeks later, will include all 36 language packs.Previously, Microsoft has said it would break SP1 into two stand-alone installers for businesses: a 450MB package that includes the five packs and a 550MB installer that offers three-dozen languages. Both are expected to be available for download from Microsoft&#39;s Web site.SP1 will also be offered to users through Windows Update, Microsoft Update and presumably Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). That update will weigh in at around 65MB. Microsoft explained the smaller size in a change log posted to its support site: &quot;Windows Update ... utilizes an efficient transfer mechanism to download only the actual bytes changed.&quot;Microsoft last issued an SP1 build on Jan. 24, when it updated the code offered to an invite-only group of approximately 15,000 testers. That build, along with one the week before, gave credence to accounts that SP1&#39;s pace had quickened, and that the service pack&#39;s release was imminent. At that time, a report out of Taiwan pegged SP1&#39;s RTM as Feb. 15.Microsoft repeated Saturday what it has said all along: Vista SP1 would go final in the first quarter of 2008, which ends March 31.&quot;We are targeting to deliver SP1 RTM in Q1 CY08,&quot; a spokeswoman said in an e-mail. Representatives of the Windows Server team, however, were not available for comment. The company has previously announced plans to launch Windows Server 2008 on Feb. 27 at an event in Los Angeles.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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(InfoWorld) - Gartner Inc. analysts expect theÂ release of Windows Vista next year will have little effect on boosting PC sales. In a recent report on PC revenue, analysts for the research firm said they don't think Vista's release in early 2007 will do anything significant to affect the growth of PC sales, which they expect to be up 10.5 percent in 2006 over 2005. "While we think the [Vista] marketing campaign will attract people, we don't see enough there to attract a mass movement or a big growth spurt," said George Shiffler, a Gartner research director. "We don't think it will encourage enough people to replace [their PCs] right then and there." Moreover, he said PCs in general are not at the top of consumers' minds, particularly with the approaching Christmas holiday shopping season. Other consumer electronics may be a bigger lure, especially since Vista will fail to make its originally promised appearance on PCs before the holidays. "There are lots of things people can spend their money on," Shiffler said. "What are PCs going to have going for them? Vista's not going to be out." Microsoft originally promised to have Windows Vista on PCs by November, but in March pushed back its release to consumers until January 2007. Some analysts predict the OS will be out later than that, though online retailer Amazon.com Inc. has Jan. 30, 2007, as Vista's availability date in listings for presales of the OS. In lieu of Vista, Microsoft said Thursday it will have a new consumer electronics product on retail shelves in time for the holidays: its Zune digital music player. The product will allow users not only to play music, photos and videos on a three-inch screen, but also allow them to share files with friends via a wireless connection. This is unlike Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, with which it is designed to compete. It also differs from the iPod by offering an FM radio tuner. In addition to the Zune player, Microsoft also will offer the Zune Marketplace, an iTunes-like service where users can purchase music tracks, and accessory packs for using the Zune player at home or in automobiles.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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It is unknown whether Amazon.com has insider information as to Microsoft Vista's release date but January 30 is listed.
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Microsoft's technical support personnel only just this week discovered that its various patches for Windows, Exchange Server, Outlook, and other tools should be installed in a precise order, otherwise they may not actually be patching networks to properly deal with the upcoming Daylight Savings Time shift, now one week earlier.
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Microsoft is counting on its beta testers to be "aggressive" as they start working on Release Candidate 1 of Windows Vista if the software maker is to make its ship dates.
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Although Microsoft Corp. may not have the first service pack for Windows Vista ready at the end of this year as some expected, financial analysts say that a delay should not have a negative effect on enterprise adoption of the OS.
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The U.S. Department of Justice and state attorneys general are concerned that Microsoft is revising deadlines that it agreed to as part of its antitrust settlement. At issue are changes that Microsoft says it needs to make in the schedule for releasing documentation related to Vista, according to a court document filed Tuesday.
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Microsoft will announce availability of business versions of its long-awaited Vista operating system on Thursday, according to analysts invited to a release event in New York City.
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(InfoWorld) - The chairman of Acer, the world's fourth largest PC vendor, forecast the company's PC shipments will grow by as much as 50 percent year-on-year in the first quarter and 40 percent for all of 2007, the company confirmed on Tuesday. Acer Chairman J.T. Wang made the prediction on Monday at a Lunar New Year celebration, according to a company spokesman. The story was first reported in the Chinese-language Economic Daily News, which said the reasons for strong growth included stronger than expected shipments of PCs armed withÂ Microsoft's new Vista OSÂ and lower PC prices resulting from aÂ price warÂ on central processing units, the brains of a PC, between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The spokesman could not immediately confirm the reasons for stronger shipments, but said Acer is seeing brisk growth in emerging markets. The report that Vista is a major cause of Acer's strong PC shipment growth in the first quarter is important because it may be an early sign the new OS is taking off, at least in some markets. Microsoft launched the consumer version of Vista in 70 countries on Jan. 30, and since then its main comment on sales of the OS has been to warn analysts that their forecasts might be too aggressive. Other technology companies have given the OS a mixed review. Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract laptop PC maker,Â credited VistaÂ with record-breaking notebook shipments in January. But Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.Â (TSMC), the world's largest contract chip maker, said VistaÂ won't have much impactÂ on PC sales growth this year. The company is considered an IT industry bellwether due to the wide variety of chips it manufactures. The microprocessor price war between Intel and AMD has been going on for several months, and is a key to creating great bargains for users by lowering overall PC costs. The processor is the most expensive component in a PC. On Jan. 21, Intel released a new price list, slashing the price of some desktop CPUs as much as 69 percent compared to its previous price list, published in late December. AMD published a new price list on Feb. 20, also showing lower prices for certain processors aimed at desktop PCs, including dual-core Athlons, compared to its Jan. 22 price list. The price lists for both companies can be found on their respective Web sites, and all prices are for lots of 1,000 processors. The top global market for Acer products is Europe, while Asia ranks second for the company. In recent years, the company has put a new focus on China and the U.S. Â
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Backing off a claim that appeared to have been made in last month's agreement update with antitrust regulators, Microsoft on Thursday said that the beta of Windows Vista Service Pack (SP1) is not imminent.
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Any delay shouldn't affect adoption of Windows Vista by enterprises, analysts say.
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Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has announced that the shipping date for SQL Server 2005 has been delayed -- a development bound to prompt an outcry from users anticipating what is the pivotal product in Microsoft's server portfolio.
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The Microsoft Corp. has decided to advance the timetable on its much-anticipated overhaul of Windows, the Financial Times reported Saturday.
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Pushing Windows Vista SP1's release into 2008 won't be the end of the world for enterprise adoption, financial analysts say.