The heads of Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin and others, must roll, says seriously disgruntled Microsoft employee (one assumes) da Punk on the Mini-Microsoft blog.
Da Punk is referring to the fact Bill and the Boyz have pulled Vista-once-known-as-Longhorn. For the nth time.
The business version won't be available until the end of this year, and the consumer version until 2007, and when it does arrive, it'll be with 60% of its code re-written, suggests a story from Down Under.
The applause is from the Mozilla Firefox end of town.
"They probably discovered that there was an easy way for someone to unbork access to the video bus in Vista's 'built-in' DRM for Hi-Def Video, so now they have to start over on that," says a Reader's Write to the post on the re-jig debacle.
"A hardware-fix, as was that 'magic marker' one for assorted cd's?" – wonders a response but, " No, you put a piece of duct tape over the little hole on the front panel of the DVD drive to prevent the broadcast flag from popping out," says the first. "Then there will be six more weeks of Beta Testing."
Meanwhile, "Now we're missing the holiday sales market. All of those laptops and PCs are going to have XP on it.
Personally, I've been holding off of buying a laptop and a new mega-big-iron PC until Vista is done. I'm super-excited to get Vista Ultimate on that new PC and be able to hook Media Center up to my Xbox 360. And now I'll wait.
"In my afternoon daydream, after Allchin's email went out, I imagined all the L68+ partners from the Windows division gathered together and told, 'You are our leadership. When we succeed, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We've had enough of failure and we've had enough of you. Drop off your badge on the way out. Your personal belongings will be dropped off at your house. Now get out of my sight.'
"Sigh."
For now, "the discussion of how you'd sell Vista in 30-seconds to a non-techy consumer hasn't come up with much Abbie-understandable reasons other than 'cooler games!' Sure, Abbie probably spends a lot of time with solitaire and minesweeper, so that's good. But most of it focuses either on issues so deep and technical that the average consumer is going to shrug and say, 'Hell, I don't think I need any of that!' or on issues that make you think that XP is a ticking time-bomb of unstable code ready to explode 1s and 0s over anyone who looks at it wrong.
"And as for Alpha Geeks and super-users, it sounds like LUA is going to be a daily pain in the patootie.
"The good news? Well, we've got plenty of time to conjure up reasons why Vista is going to be better than XP in a way that anyone can understand and agree with. Plus $500 million to spend doing it.
"Oy. Oy. Oy."
Right.
Oy, Oy, Oy."
Also See: Mini-Microsoft -Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!, March 21, 2006 Down Under - Major Vista code re-write , March 24, 2006
