Posted on 07/11/2006 7:21:00 AM PDT by ShadowAce
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday there was an 80 percent chance the company's next-generation operating system, Vista, would be ready in January.
However, Gates said at a presentation in Cape Town to Microsoft software partners that he would delay the launch if beta testing uncovered shortcomings.
The Vista software has been subject to a number of delays. Beta users of software test products before their full commercial release in an effort to uncover problems.
"We got to get this absolutely right," Gates said. "If the feedback from the beta tests shows it is not ready for prime time, I'd be glad to delay it."
He said Microsoft was investing $8 billion to $9 billion in developing Vista and the company's next version of Office, its key cash-generator. He said the company's software partners, in developing and adapting their own products for the two launches, would invest 20 times as much as Microsoft.
Gates said he hoped the next version of Office would be ready in December.
The new Vista operating system will have speech and visual recognition tools and be backed by strong security measures, he said. It would move away from reliance on easy-to-crack passwords to greater reliance on visual identification and software shields on Internet attacks.
He said the new Office would include the biggest set of innovations in more than a decade, citing its ability to work on documents simultaneously over the Internet.
The biggest market for these products soon will be China, Gates said. He said China was already the world's No. 1 mobile phone market and he expected it to be the world's top PC, broadband and software market within a few years.
"Everybody needs to be in China," he said. "Even if only 20 percent of the population is IT-active," he said, this is a huge number given the country's 1.3 billion population.
China's piracy of Microsoft software will decline, he predicted, as China becomes a bigger producer of intellectual property and sees "it will benefit as much as us" by implementing strong intellectual-property protection. He expects the Chinese government - which accounts for what he said was 35 percent of the country's software sales - to buy all its software legally this year.
Gates is in South Africa to attend a Microsoft-sponsored forum of government leaders which gathers several African heads of state and former President Clinton in debates on how technology can improve the continent's competitiveness.
Gates and his wife, Melinda, also are visiting projects supported by their philanthropic organization, which has invested billions of dollars to fight diseases such as HIV-AIDS and malaria.
Shares of Microsoft dipped 8 cents to $23.42 in pre-market trading.
I guess he means the pre-launch beta testing.
Translation: 80% chance that 20% of what was originally going to ship with Vista will ship in January.
Gates: 99 Pct. Chance Vista Ready for major security fixes by Feb
January? That will cripple Christmas sales of computers.........
Latest report - only 20% of bugs found have been acknowledged. Few have been fixed and most have been ignored - just like the rollout of XP.
Look for a huge Vista Service Pack 1 to follow after 6 months.
I am running it on one of my home PC's, the latest Beta anyways. It is running better than I expected. I dont do much with it at this time though, but it runs well.
Go with their competition.
Never a security problem.
No Microsoft call home to check on my license key, no DRM in the software, life is sweet.
I am seriously considering buying a new machine at the end of year right before Vista comes out with XP on it for that very same DRM wariness you seem to have. I intend to stay with XP until Microsoft ends support for the XP platform. That is the plan at this point anyway, I'll have Vista machines here at work so if there are any gotta have features I ought to be able to get to know Vista before any decisions about the home system has to be made.
Yawn
I am likely working on my last PC.
Certainly the last one with an MS operating system.
Hmmm... wonder if I can get a 900 gig hard drive, a 6.4 ghz dual processor, and my direct link to one of the power stations on the Grand Coulee dam installed by then?
I ain't even ready to start thinkin about the video card requirements!
Vista is gonna bomb. Companies aren't going to fork out the cash for the hardware.
[snip]However, one gets the feeling that if you stuck with the following minimum requirement specs you would have a system that runs like an ageing dog:
Based on what Microsoft developers have said to date, Vista is memory hungry so, at a guess, a 2GB system is probably the real minimum and who only has a 1GHz processor these days?[snip]
From Windows Vista Beta 2 now freely available but be warned
IT Wire ^ | June 8, 2006 | Stan Beer
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1646346/posts
Well, what they'll do is what they've done in the past. A few companies will start using it and creating Office documents, etc with the new system.
Older versions of Office won't be able to use the "features".
Heck, I'm running XP on a PII 300 MHZ laptop. It's a test machine I basically use for high speed wireless downloads.
All of the regular machines I use to do real work are running W2K or ME.
(I have about 12 computers)
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