Windows Vista Slips. Oops.

"Microsoft Corp. today confirmed that Windows Vista™, the next generation of the Windows® client operating system, is on target to go into broad consumer beta to approximately 2 million users in the second quarter of 2006. Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006 and broad consumer availability in January 2007."

This is the press release. I don't think Microsoft is lying. Instead, they are following the adage: "accentuate the positive, downplay the negative, and don't mess with Mister In Between".

The above doesn't mention that Microsoft had promised consumer-available, non-Beta Vista by the Christmas holiday season of this year, so that weirdos world-wide could get the present of their dreams: a new operating system.

Dad will have to be content with a tie this year.

Today's International Herald Tribune relates this disaster in managementese. We don't see the hours the Vista developers are putting in which are probably 24/7 and will be until next year. Allchin in the article says he is retiring after Vista ships: translation: this mess has ended his career.

At the end of the IHT article, it is said that the Vista developers hadn't developed the system properly, as "small and simple modules". This is management BS. They probably did so, and they probably used good OO techniques to make it all come together.

The problem is that given that in 1985, Microsoft refused to define sensibly what it was doing in the OS market in TECHNICAL terms, Microsoft is now committed to supporting LEGACY all the way back to 1985.

Out there, there actually IS a formal syntax for MS-DOS commands which is in fact relied upon by Windows components. Sure, there are multiple different rule sets: but the union of two formal languages is simply another formal language with a richer set of alternative productions.

Nonetheless, it is impossible for Microsoft to document these alternatives and thus outside developers, and, quite possibly developers inside Microsoft, have to reverse engineer components not under their direct control as inside developers to find out the actual contract those modules present to the world.

For were Microsoft to disclose formally what goes on inside Windows, this could be then used to code...another Windows not proprietary to Microsoft.

I'm not trying to write science fiction. This may actually be necessary if Microsoft as a company collapses under the weight of the unmanaged complexity of Windows (to use the exact words of Dijkstra as to the longterm effect of unmanaged complexity). The world would then be left with millions of desktops running Windows that can't be easily converted to Linux, and at this point, some Open Source heroes would have to be willing to code a new, open Windows!

Microsoft set out with a "business" vision alone, to own the software running the desktop. It didn't define an "operating system" as a resource manager. From a marketing standpoint, this would have been an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how fast the computer, resources are limited.

Basically, it defined "OS" in a circular and self-interested way, in which that which was not-OS consisted of the amusing little, non-Microsoft, programs that the user wanted to run.

Because in fact, you can generalize ANYTHING, Office software becomes OS software and the user is pushed to the margin, apologizing for not using the "rich" set of facilities available in Windows to solve his little problem.

I like Microsoft and Microsoft people, and I do have some regard for Gates. But in 1985, Microsoft set out not to fabricate something with unity, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and has ended up maintaining this Eretz OS, this Greater OS, this Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of an OS, this OS with no predefined technical boundary.

This is the tragedy of Empire, that glory which Shakespeare's Pucelle compares in an early play to a circle in the water. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair, because you gotta make the next release. Put your life on hold for the next year or so.