Vista: Are you Ready? Microsoft isn't

<rant>

At least not yet. There's lots of disgruntledness in the community about Microsoft own lack of preparedness.

If you bought a Zune and run vista, you'll have to resort to some hacking to get your new toy to sync up.

Want to run Visual Studio inside of Vista? Be prepared for a bumpy road.

You're a Microsoft Certified or Gold Partner and you're excited because Vista is now available for download so in an eager rush to be “ready“ you decide to deploy vista using your internal use licenses that you get as part of your partnership benefits. Sorry - there is no Volume License key available to partners yet.

</rant>

To be fair, Micrsoft has several “release” dates for Vista and depending on who you are - you pick whatever one suits you as your “deadline” for readiness. Here's a run down which might give you some idea of setting your expectations of when to get stuff you need.

RTM/Release to Manufacturing.  This is the date the bits get signed sealed and delivered. This actually happends about 30 days prior to when you think it happens when the would be final code goes into a cooling period of “let's run it internally and see if we can live without wanting to make a last minute change” otherwise known as escrow. This is a deadline for many internal product teams at microsoft.

Release to MSDN for Download.  In the case of Vista, this took about a week. I'm not sure why this takes so long - especially if MSDN could have had the preliminary bits in waiting (i.e. escrow build) a month earlier. Perhaps there is some bureaucracy in play here, but I'm not sure. There are product keys to get ready and the inevitable crunch on the servers when people start downloading. I don't think I've seen a major release of Visual Studio, Office, or Windows that hasn't crippled MSDN. And then there are product keys to get ready, etc.

Launch Day(s): This is mostly just marketing hoopla but there is certainly lots of effort here. This has very little to do with the software actually being complete. We saw this last November with the simultaneous launch of Visual Studio, SQL Server, and BizTalk. BizTalk wasn't ready for release until months after launch

November 30th: For Vista there is some magic date that was announcd. This might be a launch date only or may have some technical deliverables. This was the date that MS announced as the official release of Vista to Partners and Businesses. Perhaps this is the date that the Microsoft Partner Program folks used as their deadline for readying their systems for getting volume license keys. But considering that Partners are the ones that are going to be in most need of being “ready” (after developers) you'd think that the MPP folks would be “ready“. What most annoys me about this is the emails they send out to partners asking us if we're “ready“. How can we be ready if you're not ready.

January 30th: This is the official Consumer release date. You should expect to find Vista on store shelves and preloaded on computers this day. For many stakeholders, this is the deadline of all deadlines. I've heard that the Zune team is using this date as a deadline to get their Vista version to market. I've also heard that many computer makers are using this date as their deadline to get drivers readied.