The real reason behind the Vista delay

In a previous post I was the very first to say that Vista might be slipping a little from the original plan to ship in November - and now it seems that it will indeed be pushed to the start of 2007 ... but what is behind that delay ?

It is very simple after all - first Microsoft might have been a little concerned themselves (precisely for the reasons described in my own post) but FAR MORE IMPORTANT I suspect it was the pressure from the major PC builders (especially those with non-direct-sales) - having Vista just launched in November 2006 would mean that selling A LOT OF THE CURRENT MODELS would become very hard (close to impossible) to sell (since in no way those computers will be Vista-compatible) - so in the end Microsoft (unlike very often Apple) decided to let all those PC builders get their happy end-of-year sales, eventually even increase the free publicity for Vista with those sales (since the top-level expensive configurations will certainly have big "Vista-ready" stickers) and just have a home run at a slightly later moment ...

The moral of the story ? Just be very careful with any computer configuration that you buy this year :)

Small update - some other pages mention Jim Allchin and references to a strong connection with PC makers ! (even if somehow CNET thinks it might be bad for them - which is rather stupid since only around a minority of the current configurations are Vista-ready, just a few big and heavy notebooks and as far as I can tell absolutely no small and light notebooks !!!)