Desktop platforms Toolkit

The whys, whats and whens of Vista

Ina Fried CNET News.com

Published: 01 Aug 2005 13:25 BST

This beta is coming just a bit later than the first half of the year target set by Microsoft. It does seem that there isn't much give in the Vista schedule. How much room is there for a couple of minor delays along the way while still making Vista widely available by next Christmas?
Oh, I don't know. You're asking for a prediction that I can't give you. I mean, one of the things that we did is, we've already been running Beta 2. So we were doing that concurrently with finishing Beta 1. So at one level I'm feeling confident that we were able to do that, which is something that in the past we haven't been able to do very well, but now because of the new processes we've put in place, we're able to run it in parallel. So I don't know. We are very focused to make next year. We're not going to skimp on quality, but we are very focused to make next year.

In the past, Microsoft executives had said there should be a way with Windows Vista to get a laptop that's both a Media Centre and a Tablet PC. Is there more you can say about what flavours Vista will come in?
No, no; not yet, not yet.

There's been a discussion of a concept called InfoCards that would store authentication details. Has Microsoft decided whether to include that as part of Vista, and what that might look like?
I don't think we've made anything public on that yet, so no comment on that.

Microsoft announced the official name for this release of Windows — Vista — sooner than it has for some past versions. Is that to try and sort of remove the concept of Longhorn, which had morphed quite a bit from its original inception?
No. No, the work was done on a name six months, maybe nine months, ago, and for once we were able to keep a secret. And so I actually consider this to be just great marketing in the sense that we typically pick the names way too late.

If you talk to naming consultant types and you ask them about operating system names, with Tiger and Panther, they would say, well, that conveys a sense of energy. What do you hope customers will sense with Vista?
That it brings clarity, that it's about making things clearer, and it's pretty simple. I mean, we think that name, it can bring clarity to the clutter that you've got today, and the overload of information, and can bring perhaps a little vision into the future.