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"We are expecting Vista will likely be late," Gartner analyst Michael Silver said. "Microsoft has given itself a very tight deadline, and Vista is a very complex product."

Earlier this week, during speeches in Beijing and Seoul, Ballmer said Microsoft was still on track to ship Vista in January 2007.

However, in Tokyo, on May 24, Ballmer said Microsoft might be a few weeks late in shipping Vista. The following day, Ballmer appeared to backtrack, saying that Microsoft would still meet its January deadline but that it needed to receive feedback from its partners.

"We are targeting Windows Vista availability for volume license customers in November 2006 and general availability in January 2007," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mail responding to questions about Ballmer's comments. "The exact delivery date will ultimately be determined by quality."

Hedging Bets

"I think that Steve Ballmer is definitely keeping the door open for the possibility that Vista will be late," Silver said. "Microsoft wants to be sure that Vista's quality is up to standard before making it broadly available."

On May 1, Gartner published a research report that said Vista will be released nine to 12 months after the release of the Beta 2 version. "The Beta 2 version just came out, and in a few weeks time there will be a second Beta 2 version of Vista," Silver said. "So I guess this means it could be the second quarter of 2007 before Vista is widely available."

Silver said that, for most business customers, the fact that Vista might be late will not make much difference. "2007 will be the year for them to plan their Vista migration," he said.

Gartner analyst Steve Kleynhans said the research firm is telling its corporate clients not to pin their Vista plans to Microsoft's statements on its release date.

Still Windows XP

Simon Yates, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that consumers and corporations largely will be indifferent to the news that Vista might be late.

"The main thing is that Microsoft will miss the Christmas holiday season, which means that PC vendors won't get the sales boost from people buying new computers for Christmas with Vista loaded on them," Yates said.

"Our research suggests that U.S. corporates are still migrating their staff to Windows XP," he said. "They want a single, stable operating system platform across their companies, and are likely to wait until they have finished their XP migration before moving to Vista."

Also, he said, because Vista has hardware requirements that are different from Windows XP's needs, businesses likely will wait until Vista's first service pack update is released before installing the new operating system.

Testing the Beta

Stacey Quandt, research director for security at Aberdeen Group, said that there is a big difference between a beta and the final version. "The more time that users have to test the Beta 2 version will help Microsoft to eliminate bugs and potential security events," Quandt said.

"The availability of most proprietary software products has more to do with deadlines set by marketing than development," she said. "Microsoft Vista falls into this category and the hard part is that setting expectations for availability has a ripple effect on resources for testing and deployment."

Quandt said that, if the ship date for Vista were to slip because of an issue in development, customers would be better off. "However," she said, "Microsoft marketing has different goals and would see this quite differently."

By Robin Arnfield