One of my coworkers, Tim Sneath, and I were just talking and he said he saw that some people were confused by the news last week (he's getting calls). Some people thought we had announced that there would be a business version, released in November, and that a different version would be released in January. Not true.
Same version, it just takes two months to get it into the retail channel. This happens every time Windows is released (I was on the betas of Windows 95 and had the final code almost two months before it was on store shelves). MSDN Subscribers who get Windows OS releases will get the gold disks sooner than you'll be able to buy Windows Vista from, say, Dell or Acer.
Oh, and how complex is Windows Vista to ship? Well, take a look at this post/picture from J. P. Stewart. He's a test lead on one of the networking teams. He posted a picture that shows how many new features Windows Vista's networking stack has. Now, remember that that's just for Networking. There's a similar team for security. A similar team for audio. A similar team for video. A similar team for imaging. A similar team for printing. A similar team for UI. A similar team for kernel. And on, and on, and on, and on.
If one of those squares isn't ready to ship, it can hold up the whole boat. So, when people are looking for me to point fingers, or explain why this is late, there's no real way to do that. Not unless I get around to every team. I've been walking around Microsoft for two years with a camcorder. That has turned into more than 600 interviews. Out of 60,000 people. Getting a complete story just is very difficult. But, I come back to that image. One square. If it's not ready, we shouldn't ship.
Anyway, there's a ton of cool stuff coming through my aggregator. I'll try to get a bunch up in the next post.
