The good news is that Vista will have the highest qualities set by veteran developer Jim Allchin. He is in fact the man most associated with the development of the operating system. Yet, I've learned to take everything of what Microsoft has to say with a grain of salt. The retiring veteran hinted on putting his retirement and Vista release on the backburner until everything is just right. Ultimately this could mean the delay of Vista. Why does the word 'typical' come to mind?

Allchin gave an overview last week of Windows Vista, the new version of Microsoft's flagship software that Allchin's team is set to deliver before he retires at the end of 2006 and he said that it is on track to go on sale by the holidays (this usually means the end of November). Microsoft has completed Vista development and it now has to go through some more stages of testing before it ships out. Since Microsoft has been getting quality feedback from its CTP releases, Microsoft is keen on getting the product up to the quality that Allchin has in mind.

Microsoft's Co-President of the Platforms, Products & Services Division said in an interview in San Francisco that "Where we sit today, things are going according to plan, and we're feeling very good… But I always like to preface that as I did with Windows 2000, Windows XP: quality is the thing that will dictate if we're ready to go. So if we have any problems in quality, I'll slip this product. It's the thing that is at the top of my mind."

He added in the interview that "We want to make sure we drive the quality up very high… When we do something like Windows that's literally going to [have] hundreds of millions of users using it, we want to build the highest-quality piece of software we can within a reasonable time frame. But at a certain point we make a determination: is this good enough for hundreds of millions or not? And if you rush something like that, then you end up harming everyone - our partners, us, our customers, so it has to be top of line."

It'll be a "catch 22" with whatever Microsoft plans on doing. Complaints for delays on the next OS are bound to come from eagerly anticipating users and complaints from users are bound to come for a product that gets shipped out with lots of bugs. Microsoft should consider including the quote "I can only please one person per day, today is not your day, tomorrow doesn't look good either" on their products from now on.