Robert McLaws says Microsoft needs to delay Windows Vista. I agree with about 90% of what he says:
I’ve been defending Microsoft’s ship schedule for Windows Vista for quite some time. Up to this point, I’ve been confident that Vista would be at the quality level it needs to be by RC1 to make the launch fantastic. Having tested several builds between Beta 2 and today, I hate to say that I no longer feel that way.
Robert says Microsoft should “Push the launch back 4-6 weeks and launch at the end of February [and] add another beta to the development cycle.” Make that “end of March” and I’ll sign up too.
There’s some truly great stuff in Windows Vista, but current builds are not at the quality level they need to be at for a release candidate to appear in the next few weeks. If management insists on hitting an arbitrary January ship date, the results will be disappointing at best, and potentially nightmarish.
Jim, are you listening?
Ed Bott 
I keep hearing end of March from others, but I think it would be hard for Microsoft to justify another three month delay. “A few more weeks to tighten the screws” is sellable. RTMing before the holiday break gives them 3 1/2 more months to get it wrapped… which I think would be plenty.
And thanks for the comments. Good to know I’m not out in left field on this one.
Great idea…esp about giving the devs a break, coz I bet they need one BAD. Sometimes stepping away from it all and coming back in with a fresh-mindset will help you fix all your problems and lend a new perspective to things.
Ed, you mentioned sometime back when build 5472 came out you’d be installing it and giving us a good in-depth review of it. Where is it?? I’ve been waiting to hear your thoughts on the latest build…
I said that? What was I thinking?
Seriously, I generally avoid “reviews” of interim builds, which are by nature incomplete and buggy and not available to the public. But I probably should do a Windows Vista interim report.
Perhaps I was mistaken then! Hmm, I’ve read Paul Thurott’s views and Robert’s views on some of the interim builds, but haven’t really heard anything from you, so I figure you owe us one 😉
C’mon u know you want to…
As a retired mainframe programmer/analyst I have to agree with evilkat about taking a break from the programming for a while. I wasn’t even working on operating systems, but sometimes the code would just start running together after a while and there was no point in trying to fix it until I’d had a nice break – for me, those were maybe 20 minutes or overnight…in this case maybe a week or 2….
Media Player is half-baked, search/indexing is frightening, and setup can’t get locales/keyboards for English locales outside of the US right and we’re supposedly past Beta 2?
I see these locale problems as blocking issues for any of the one or two customers working in UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc. If Vista can’t get that stuff right at account setup time, it means you can’t properly test anything that comes afterwards. 4-6 weeks doesn’t seem like half enough bake time, even if Microsoft’s next released build got those elements right.
Robert, you’re not a Microsoft developer, you’re not working on Windows Vista team, so you don’t know how the Windows Vista development is going. So please shut up your mouth!