Moonbear, you spoke too soon. Office is now official delayed until 2007:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1942069,00.asp
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There is also a lot of buzz on the internet today about another possible Vista development reset. Microsoft is even bringing in people from the Xbox team to help out:
http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Computing/Platforms?Article=/Computing/Platforms/R7G5G6U4
The last reset was a few years ago when they switched from the windows xp code base to the windows 2003 code base.
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The programmers working for Microsoft aren't that happy either:
"Basically we do not believe Vista will make January 2007 or even March 2007. Anyone with any access knows what a frankenstein's monster NT is on the inside. At some point there is a law of diminishing returns trying to do anything to it at all, it seems like that limit is being reached today. The release is pushed back because of bugs but fixing those bugs will create more bugs. It is just godawful to be honest. And the process gets in the way at every step.At some point we will have to do something and i know at least some in my team privately agree with me. We will have to throw out everything and start again. This is what Apple did with OSX, and sure it was painful, but it worked and now they're kicking our asses. We should have done that in 2000. Now it is even more obvious we should do it. Start again and just run a compatibility layer on top. Apple did it with classic why can't we?
IF we manage to ship vista at ALL then it is a miracle and the absolute last rev we can possible do working like this. It is insane the manhours wasted rearranging a house of cards. We need to START AGAIN PEOPLE.
I honestly do not believe we can ship another OS in this way. Either we do an OSX or Vista is the end of the line, YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE!
And BTW mini PLEASE enable https on your comments page. You would have to be nuts to post here from inside the network via plain http. Anyone else wants to do it, do what i do, email the comment (encrypted) to a friend and get him to post it. Anyone who thinks SMG doesn't have a filter looking at anything to or from minimsft is kidding themselves."
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"Being a 10 year vet I feel ashamed and sad. This company is a mess on so many levels."
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"Vista is a disaster. The "reset" you mention is nothing less than a FAILURE to SHIP. What you're working on now isn't Longhorn, it's SP4. Don't kid yourself.
If you want to salvage your career, flee to Office, or better yet, get the heck out of the company before it all collapses."
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03/vista-2007-fire-leadership-now.html
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It is looking more and more like another Windows ME disaster, or even possibly worse.