Doubt's Log

In the latest I Cringely, Cringely offers analysis that just doesn't make sense to me. He predicts that Dell was the reason that Vista isn't shipping this holiday season. While I believe he is 100% correct that it has to do with OEM lead time, he is way off thinking it was Dell. Dell is the company that doesn't have long inventory chains and assembles the computers at the last possible minute. Other OEMS like HP have long lead times as they ship machines assembled and installed from Asia (and it really is a long boat ride). Microsoft had a choice, let Vista come out when it is ready and have a piecemeal market availability as more agile OEMS hit the holiday market, or do one giant launch when everyone can have the OS installed. He finally acknowledges this aspect as an afterthought, but I think it's the most critical piece to the decision.

He then takes a sweeping amount of ignorance and combines it with a single datapoint from a conference to get that vista won't be any better regarding security and malware. As someone who has gone through the culture shift here and seen so many features thrown on the back burner to make room for UAC, protected mode IE, theat models, security audits (internal and external) and more. I just have to guess he isn't following this area at all.

Then he makes a prediction that Apple's Bootcamp will just make Microsoft more money because apple users will buy Windows retail. I think a good analogy for this is naked pcs, where people buy a machine without an OS or one with Lindows and just pops in a Window XP CD they have around or borrowed from some one else. I'm less worried about retailers doing it or businesses, but it remains to be seen how much these channels will want Windows on their boxen.