Microsoft Pushes for Vista On Time and Ready

SEATTLE—Microsoft is still aiming for an on-time delivery of its Windows Vista, but in the meantime, it wants as many people as possible—millions and millions—to take it for a test drive.

Despite suggesting it might delay the OS again if it receives negative feedback from testers, Microsoft executives speaking at WinHEC said the company was working to deliver the final code of its Windows Vista operating system to business in November and to PC makers and retail in January 2007.

It will also deliver a new logo program, designed to help buyers distinguish between basic and premium-level PCs that offer the OS in time for the holiday season.

Despite the potential to delay, Microsoft wants as many people as possible give its Windows Vista Beta 2, released on May 23 to WinHEC attendees and now available as a download, a test drive.

The software giant expects that as many as 2 million people will try it out.

“This is the final big milestone beta were working to offer to the market before the big release,” Bryan Koski, a product manager in Microsofts Windows Group, said during a WinHEC presentation in Seattle.

“This is our biggest launch in a decade. Its actually our biggest launch ever.”

The company has also devised a series of scenarios under which it says businesses could benefit from deploying the OS and it will use them—and encourage PC makers to adopt them as well—in an effort to convince businesses to make the move quickly.

Among them is worker productivity, backed by features designed to make it easier to find and use information by searching across file types on the desktop and across external devices and the network, Koski said.

/zimages/6/28571.gifClick hereto read more about early feedback from testers of the Vista beta.

Features such as Client-Side Cache allow a person to do a search on the network and still have access to them when disconnected preview documents without having to open them.

/zimages/6/128936.gifTo listen to eWEEKs Podcast about Microsofts “Beta Bonanza,”click here.

Although must IT managers arent expecting to make the move for at least a year, while they test out the OS and wait for its first service pack update to be released.

“Deployment is costly,” Koski said. “So one of the ways we overcome that…is to talk about how we lower the cost of deployment, how we lower management costs.”

Next Page: Protections.

Protections

Among them are changes in the development process designed to ensure that software code included in Vista is secure by running through a threat modeling scheme.

To help out corporate IT, Windows Vista will also employ User Account Control, which takes away user privileges in a corporate setting, preventing workers from installing applications.

Internet Explorer 7, to be released with the OS, will also include a protected mode, which prevents it from influencing the rest of the OS.

The company will also offer BitLocker, a feature that encrypts the whole volume of a PCs hard drive.

Microsoft is committed to delivering “the highest quality operating system ever” in Vista, Koski said.

Thus the company is shooting for large number of downloads in an effort to get “get as much feedback as possible so we can insure you the best operating system possible,” he said.

To date, the company has already incorporated several hundred changes to the OS based on customer and tester feedback.

But while customers wait for Vista to arrive, Microsoft will roll out a new logo program by the 2006 holiday season, where the bulk of consumers PCs are sold each year.

The company, in keeping with its May 18 hardware requirement announcement, will offer PC makers one of two Vista logos, including a Vista Basic logo and a Vista Premium logo.

/zimages/6/28571.gifTo read more about the Vista betas debut at WinHEC,click here.

A basic logo will denote a PC that meets the minimum hardware specs to run Vista, will appear on most computers, Koski said.

The premium logo will show that a PC has the hardware necessary to run Vistas three-dimensional Aero interface.

“Premium is something you might go for when you really want to showcase the new features in Windows Vista,” Koski said.

/zimages/6/28571.gifCheck out eWEEK.coms for Microsoft and Windows news, views and analysis.