Yukon, Whidbey Releases Slip Yet Again

Yukon, Whidbey Releases Slip Yet Again - ' Microsoft says no wish'
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-washiness involved"> Microsofts Rizzo disagreed with the premise that Yukon development has been wishy-washy, however. "If you look at the focus of Yukon over the years, weve always had the same tenets: enterprise data management, including security, reliability, manageability and availability. Another thing weve focused on is developer productivity. Integration with the .Net framework, with XML, with Web services support. And finally, business intelligence. Were taking business intelligence to the next level. Were providing an integrated, comprehensive BI platform that delivers information customers need at the right time to make the right decisions. Weve talked about those three areas of focus for the past five years."

There are both positive and negative aspects of these delays. Users would, of course, prefer that vendors ship rock-solid products, regardless of how long that takes. "In the case of Yukon, Im confident that SQL Server customers would rather wait another year and get a rock-solid release, than [they would like to] potentially get a release tomorrow that isnt as well-tested and debugged," wrote Steve Foote, a consultant with Enswers Inc., in Cambridge, Mass., in an e-mail conversation.

Besides, customers dont want to spend any more of their time installing major new releases of database software than is absolutely necessary, Foote pointed out. "Its disruptive of the business," he wrote. "E.g., downtime for installation/upgrading, development modifications to take advantages of new database features, etc. Furthermore, as is the case with every new major release of any vendors software, there are always going to be bugs … usually because the major new release is rushed to market."

Next page: The Software Assurance program dilemma.

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