Leading industry analysts have repeated warnings that
Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system will miss its
scheduled November release to major corporations.
Vista was originally scheduled for general launch this year but
Microsoft announced in March that it would not be released to
corporations until November or made generally available until
January 2007, because the software giant was behind schedule in
tackling security issues.
Steve Kleynhans, research vice-president at analyst firm
Gartner, said Microsoft had made “significant improvements” in each
interim build of Vista since its Beta 2 release.
But in a post on his blog he added, “However, as with most
things, the devil is in the details, and at the moment, based on my
continued testing and day-to-day use of Vista, the details are
still pretty rough.”
The latest Vista build, 5472, was “a pretty solid platform, and
one that can be used for day-to-day activities, with little fear of
serious disruption”, he added. It offered better performance,
greater stability and compatibility with a broader range of
applications than the beta 2 version.
But there were “still a lot of holes under the surface”,
Kleynhans said, including “a large number of small glitches and
failures”. He added, “It's not unusual to find my system suddenly
lock up for minute or longer.”
He concluded, “I don’t expect to see a finished product in
November.”
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