Following last Friday's announcement that Vista is on schedule, it appears that Microsoft has made much faster progress than many (including Gartner) had expected in getting its next Windows OS ready for release. Given the patchy nature of the Beta releases we saw earlier this year, this is a noteworthy achievement, and it says much about the company's determination to meet the deadline it set for itself in March.

However, we still question the wisdom of a general (consumer) release in January. The impact of staging such a significant product launch immediately after the holiday period can only be detrimental for the PC industry as a whole. Some PC buyers will inevitably delay buying new PCs to make sure they get the new OS preloaded, resulting in demand shifting from the months of November and December (the months of highest demand in the PC market calendar, when prices are generally higher) to January and February (when buyers expect prices to be discounted). The net effect for PC OEMs is likely to be a shortfall in revenue for the fourth quarter of this year that will not be entirely made up for by "Vista demand" in the first quarter of 2007. Even if Microsoft supports a coupon upgrade for holiday season buyers in an attempt to alleviate this, OEMs will bear much of the cost of distributing the new OS to consumers and handling the support calls that follow when they install Vista.

So, although we salute Microsoft’s dogged determination, we believe it is demonstrating scant regard for the PC ecosystem on which it depends. With OEM sales of Windows accounting for the majority of its $13 billion Client BU revenue and PC OEMs enduring tough market conditions, this is a decision that Microsoft may come to regret in the years ahead. The average operating margin for PC OEMs continues to be less than 2%, and any revenue shortfall risks triggering further market consolidation. These considerations may yet persuade Microsoft to push back the Vista launch.

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It looks like you are just being critical of Microsoft to cover up your failed prediction. I don’t understand the necessity of such a report now. Neither Microsoft is going to postpone the release date nor OEMs are going to pressure Microsoft to announce a new release date. Don’t you think Microsoft took account of these factors before it set a release date in January. This seems very childish.

why is Gartner sooo anti-MS...perhaps, no advertising revenue from MS?

Brian, so what makes you think that you have enough understanding or credibility to make any comments/predictions on Microsoft and people should believe what you say? You had to eat your own words on the Vista release and every comment that Gartner makes is so obviously negative that I am pretty sure that there is some hidden agenda here... Why don't you just stop playing games and come clean about it?

Whilst I'm sure this debate about release dates is of interest to the PC industry, as business consumers of this technology, it would be good to concentrate on the "what" and "how" rather than the "when". For most large organisations, the if the when drifts by 6 to 12 months then that's not a big issue as it can take that long, as a minimum, to implement a new desktop OS.
What is Vista bringing to the Corporate market? What is different that can't largely be done via careful application of the settings in AD? What is the cost of roll-out vs staying on XP (or in many organisation's cases, W2K), should we roll out as we replace hardware or wait for Vista + 1 as a big bang approach - what are the pros and cons? Will we see the return on the expense of upgrading all our hardware to cope with the new OS (I understand it won't ship on CD - it's too big)? Should we ditch all this thick client stuff and invest heavily in Citrix / SoftGrid to get away from the desktop management pain?
Lets concentrate on these issues - they're the ones that matter to Gartner's typical Window user communities.

You can order the software on CD or DVD if you are a Volume Licensing customer -- you set your CD or DVD preferences on the MVLS web site.