A new “Road Map” for Windows Vista admits it will be delayed beyond the Christmas and holidays period for 2006.

A press release from Redmond buries the news under the laughable phrase: “Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006″, but follows that with: “… and broad consumer availability in January 2007″.

“REDMOND, Wash. — March 21, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today confirmed that Windows Vista, the next generation of the Windows client operating system, is on target to go into broad consumer beta to approximately 2 million users in the second quarter of 2006. Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006 and broad consumer availability in January 2007.”

A product due for 2003 is now “promised” for 2007. A complete product cycle has been missed.

That’s a huge disaster for computer manufacturers and retailers who will have to sell XP machines just a month or so before Vista becomes “broadly available”.

Mini-Microsoft weighs in with: “Fire the leadership now.”

It certainly sounded like Microsoft leadership committed to us, our customers, our partners, and our shareholders that Vista would be out in 2006.

Slip!

… I was upset at missing the back-to-school market. Now we’re missing the holiday sales market. All of those laptops and PCs are going to have XP on it.

This is truly dreadful, and what awful spin in the presentation. Robert Scoble is rather sheepish too. I hesitate to link to him: the poor chap is having a nervous breakdown. And who can wonder? Nevertheless, here’s the link.

GoDaddy.com is to migrate its entire host-name portfolio onto Microsoft Solution for Windows-Based Hosting.

The Redmond press release proclaims:

REDMOND, Wash. — March 21, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that GoDaddy.com, the world’s leading domain name registrar, is transitioning approximately 4.5 million Web domains to be hosted on the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting. Upon completion of the migration, Go Daddy will have moved all its parked domains from Linux to the Windows platform.

“Our business is based on providing the best possible service at the lowest possible price. This strategy requires us to maximize all of our resources, particularly our technology assets,” said Warren Adelman, GoDaddy.com president and COO. “It was clear from all of the testing we’ve conducted that Microsoft provides an efficient and scalable operating platform, while also providing the performance needed to handle our extraordinary growth.”

Maybe the company should change its name to GoneDaddy as a farewell gesture to the OpenSource community.

How would you answer if at a crowded conference someone asked you outright why Windows Vista is better than Windows XP?

Or for that matter why Office 2007 (formerly 12) should be preferred to Office 2003?

Mini-Microsoft, Redmond’s rogue blogger, asks how “If your non-techie friend or financial advisor or Mom asked you that question, what are you going say?

“I only ask because recently I was watching a video of a speaker at Microsoft. During the Q&A, he asked that question of a lady Microsoftie in the audience. Not only could you tell her brain was momentarily frozen (uhhhhhh), you could feel that the entire crowd hit a panicked brain freeze. The lady then came up with an almost apologetic answer saying the Vista is more stable, safer, and faster than XP.”

This is clearly an important response which ought to be instantaneous for people who actually work for Microsoft, he thinks

“I do think Vista is great, but even I can’t come up with a 30-second knock-it-out-of-the-park reason as to why anyone would part with their hard-earned money to upgrade to it. Which I feel bad about and I’m going to work on it. I figure everyone at Microsoft needs to have an honest answer as to why our two cash cows are worth upgrading to.”

Hmm, whenever were snake-oil salesmen stumped for such a reply? Maybe it’s a sign of honesty at Redmond.

Origami is an “ultra-small PC” with a amazing number of applications. Since we haven’t been able to get our hands on one yet, we’ll rely on Michael Gartenburg’s review for Jupiter Research.

Gartenburg asserts: “Origami isn’t an iPod killer per se, it’s rather a new class of device that will compete with other devices that cost about the same. That means portable media players, game machines, GPS units and the like will face some new challenges.”

Its versatility lies in its potential, which has not yet been fully realized: “The fact that Origami is a PC based platform means that there’s a lot of functionality that it’s going to be capable of and like the PC be able to offer a no-compromise solution for most of these applications. Is it the most powerful PC you own? No, but the PC you have at hand is better than the best machine you leave behind.”

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