Some businesses already have Vista. It will be on personal computers on sale in the next few months. It will be the last operating system that Microsoft will ever release for the personal computer.

It is a little late. Microsoft Vista was intended to be with us in 2003. It did not happen simply because the move to Vista from Windows XP simply would not work. Jim Allchin, seen here, was the chap who had to bring the good news to Bill Gates that Longhorn, the code name for the new Windows, did not work. It had to be done again from scratch.

In a wide-ranging interview with Mary Jo Foley on ZDNet  Allchin said, ‘The truth is that Windows Vista has been done in two and a quarter years. That’s the truth. We basically started in August or so of 2004.’

Which we will think of as the ‘Longhorn Reset’.

He wanted Microsoft to have its props for what it did do aside from not getting Vista out of the door. He said, ‘There’s a whole set of products that we’re not getting credit for that we did ship. Three versions of Media Center, two versions of Tablet, and Windows XP 64, a Windows 2003 Server, a Windows 2003 SP 1, which has X64 in it, and a service pack which by any other means would have been a release, called Windows XP SP 2. . . And we made mistakes. . . it got delayed by over five years due to various reasons. . . The delay in the launch has cost Microsoft, billions of dollars.’

That was all in an interview in October. There is no evidence to think Microsoft has changed its mind much since then.

Jim Allchin, shortly to depart Microsoft, believes there has to be an operating system although he is not keen on the idea of announcing big launches and then missing the date by a few years.

What we are going to see are a series of upgrades to Vista which will bring it up to the level it should have been at launch.
These will have code names and the suggestion is they may be called Fiji, Vienna and, for music, Monaco.

But the word from Redmond is that these are all add-ons, extensions of Vista. Not, as has been reported, a totally new operating system.

Allchin was unbelievably emphatic in stating that the operating system will continue to exist. That it will never be on the Internet which he referred to as ‘a cloud.’

An informed guess (in fact, a little better than that) is that this is, indeed, the last operating system that Microsoft will produce. It will be tweaked, added to, extended. It was designed for that from the very begininning. But it will be the last OS no matter what form it takes.

In the same way that Bill Gates swung Microsoft around on a sixpence to embrace the Internet so Steve Ballmer (incredibly astute despite his pictures and his notorious Monkey Dance) will swing Vista around so that it is a base for working on the Internet as well as a base for working solo.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 8:58 am under Microsoft, Technology, Vista, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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