Top Windows executive Bill Veghte has said the company is telling PC makers that Windows 7 may or may not be ready in time for 2009's Christmas season.
"I'm telling them that it could go either way," Veghte told ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News.com, in an interview on Wednesday. "We will ship it when the quality is right, and earlier is always better, but not at the cost of ecosystem support and not at the cost of quality.
Veghte also said the economy is factoring into his marketing plans for Windows, which is in the middle of an advertising push initially estimated at several hundred million dollars over several years.
"Given the economic situation, as shareholders would expect us to tighten our belt, but with the things that are most important, and customers would expect us to do that while continuing to innovate," he said. "The expectation is that the dollar we spend on advertising today will go further than it did in July... and the Windows business is pretty core to Microsoft, it's core to the Microsoft brand, so we will continue to invest in support of Windows."
Asked whether he thought the same applied to the unit's staffing level, he said Windows is core to the success of the company, but added that he's "certainly looking at how we can be more efficient, and given the mission in our advertising spending… efficient in where we apply our headcount and efficient, but not at the risk of jeopardising the opportunity that we have".
Talkback
Whose definition of "quality" is being used here? The dictionary definition is a lot different than Microsoft's definition.
I tried to figure out what MS "division" Mr V was in. Then his ID popped out---
' Veghte also said the economy is factoring into his marketing plans for Windows, which is in the middle of an advertising push initially estimated at several hundred million dollars over several years.'
He's a marketing manager. Great. I guess the lesson of Visaster didn't really sink in. He's already "teasing" the market by clouding up the expected delivery date. (Using the excuse that we won't release it until its ready was the exact same excuse used for Vista's delay until after the Christmas season. They should have waited another year to release Vista!)
We already know the stockholders are screaming for a return to their double digit stock price growth. Oh wait a minute, a lot of the Microsoft employees are stockholders! (That's normally a conflict of interest in other sectors of society and commerce. Stock options should be counted as pay! They start having to pay income tax on the options then they wouldn't sit there in the employee's account accumulating un-relinquished value and stock splits.)
The first public Beta got released 2 days ago then got shutoff due to "unprecedented demand" thereby generating a new level of download frenzy. (Microsoft had to know EXACTLY that the Beta release would generate incredible amounts of download traffic. They DDoS'ed themselves. Using the excuse that they didn't have enough server resources to handle the load cracks me up! Gee I guess a Windows Server 2008 cluster farm just can't handle it!)
Marketing is already going full-tilt to pump-up Windows 7 sales into the stratosphere. (We've seen more PR propaganda for an unreleased operating system product than there ever was for any previous version of Windows. I think I'm going to start calling it Mojave. Mojave is a desert, there's basically nothing there except a lot of heat. Its a mirage. That's the funniest part of that idiotic Vista campaign. Way funnier then the stupid Seinfeld shoe ads.)