Well, there’s a hostage to fortune. And it’s made not by us, but by David Coursey of PCMag.com. Readers will know we’ve had our doubts about this, especially after the sporadic releases of Beta 2, now being served in bits and pieces.

David claims: “After my recent Jim Allchin column ran, I got an interesting call from an ex-Microsoft person: ‘What makes you think Vista will actually ship this year?’ my friend demanded, then adding a list of hurdles the operating system faces before it can RTM—release to manufacturing–and, after that, spring upon the world at-large. ‘Because Jim Allchin told me it would,’ I responded.”

If anyone can say that wth certainty it’s Allchin. He it was who marched into Bill Gates’s office back in 2004 and told him bluntly Vista wasn’t working. It needed to be rewritten from the ground up. Gates eventually agreed. So Allchin is someone who doesn’t BS on Windows Vista.

David Coursey seems to agree too:

Now, I know that sounds naïve at first blush, especially considering Vista’s history of missed targets and its reduced feature set. The latter, by the way, is perhaps the most important decision Windows czar Allchin made to get the operating system to ship at all.

While the Vista betas currently in circulation are clearly not ready to ship, they really aren’t that bad, either.

Further, what Microsoft really must ship this year is a Vista that will run on all the Media Centers and other PCs that will be sold next Christmas.

“Allchin is very proud of a chart he has that shows his release date predictions have, for the past year, all come true. That’s a good sign. So is the pending release of a feature complete beta, meaning all hands at Microsoft can be shifted to testing, fixing and tweaking.”

It seems Jim Allchin has announced his retirement at the end of this year … after Vista ships.