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This is absolutely entertaining and I ought to share it here with you. Although it highly possible that you already got to it. I was reading this wonderful blog post by an insider about how disappointed and frustrated are Microsoft employees today because of the embarrassing delays in the (featureless and already delayed-several-times) upcoming Windows version: Vista.

Article apart, which you can go and read and I encourage you to do so, take a look at the first few dozens of comments. I will quote below some of my favorites. This is really so enlightening about the inner workings of lazy giant caught up in a bureaucratic disaster.

"The migration to Vista will be a passive one, as someone else previously mentioned; appearing on new computers bought by companies.

The same for home users; a lot of people do not know enough to figure out what hardware upgrades they need ; so again, it will appear on new computers."

Is this what Windows has become? An upgrade no one wants, forced upon them because the new hardware they're buying doesn't support anything less?

Compare this to OS X, where people fall all over themselves trying to get the newest version running on their old hardware because there's actual value in the new features.

So Vista has its guts ripped out, slips, and we wait another 5 years for a potentially insipring version of Windows, meanwhile Apple ships another 3 updates to OS X.

I hope to God Office 12 steps up and kicks some ass.

"We could and should have shipped sooner with 20% of the current feature set. Seriously, what makes people think that anyone cares about all of these other features beyond the bullet points that will sell the product"

EXACTLY... It's about time we face the fact that the OS is nothing more than a hosting platform for REAL apps. Just like IE is for cool websites. We don't need apps on there done by us...calc and notepad are it. Let someone else "skin" Windows, let someone else write the stupid solitaire and let's do the security, kernel and move on. You honestly think anyone sits there wondering at the marvel that is Windows Explorer? No, they go in long enough to open an app or a file. Who gives a f--k what the folders look like, stop pretending that is important and requires a date slip.

MS is a big company and its getting ever bigger. Computer and software industry have to be quick and adaptable otherwise the inner bureaucratic mechanism will destroy the machine from inside. The managers are sitting in their ebony towers and deny the fact that there is a problem.

And the winner is....

Today's announcement is of course no surprise to anyone inside MS. The only surprise is that it was such a short delay announced.

Basically we do not believe Vista will make January 2007 or even March 2007. Anyone with any access knows what a frankenstein's monster NT is on the inside. At some point there is a law of diminishing returns trying to do anything to it at all, it seems like that limit is being reached today. The release is pushed back because of bugs but fixing those bugs will create more bugs. It is just godawful to be honest. And the process gets in the way at every step.

At some point we will have to do something and i know at least some in my team privately agree with me. We will have to throw out everything and start again. This is what Apple did with OSX, and sure it was painful, but it worked and now they're kicking our asses. We should have done that in 2000. Now it is even more obvious we should do it. Start again and just run a compatibility layer on top. Apple did it with classic why can't we???

IF we manage to ship vista at ALL then it is a miracle and the absolute last rev we can possible do working like this. It is insane the manhours wasted rearranging a house of cards. We need to START AGAIN PEOPLE.