So who out there hasn’t heard that the consumer release of Windows Vista has slipped again?

I’m not going to rant on Micrsoft about this – I’m one of those people that belives that any product destined to reside on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide should be as close to perfect as possible.

Kudos Microsoft!

The important thing with an OS upgrade with the scope of Vista is stability.  As both a corporate IT architect and a home consumer of MS producs, I have an expectation of technology.  Usually I’m the one that accepts the glitches, the anomolies, the problems with most software.  I simply either work around them, or understand that that is how the program simply “works”, or don’t even notice.  To be precise, I understand how it works and accept the faults as a matter of course.

This outlook of mine has started to change in the last few months or so, and with Vista I’ve changed my expectations more than I thought I ever would.  More and more, I am using technology for a reason, not simply because technology is cool.  There are tons of cool things out there, electronics, software, golf clubs, whatever… but this time cool isn’t going to cut it.  I am anticipating not just “the most stable version of Windows yet” (which incidentally I’ve already had several times – NT, Win98, W2K, XP), but the most usable system as well.

Well here is looking forward to the future – it’ll be closer to a year from now to walk into the store and pick up a retail version of Vista, but it should be worth it.

As an aside – when the public preview comes out, you should try the new OS out.  It is definitely different, though not radically so, and will take quite a bit of getting used to.