mordant wit

It will not have escaped your attention that Microsoft is labouring to finish the next version of its Windows operating system, Vista. A version aimed at the corporate market is supposed to be ready for Christmas, with the consumer edition following some time later (missing the Christmas market, which has irritated computer manufacturers and retailers more than somewhat). Last week, Gartner, a leading IT consultancy, predicted that Microsoft would miss those shipping dates.

'Microsoft's track record is clear: it consistently misses target dates for major operating system releases,' the firm wrote. 'We don't expect broad availability of Windows Vista until at least the second quarter of 2007, which is nine to 12 months after Beta 2.' Microsoft challenged this. A company spokesman told CNET News: 'We remain on track to deliver the final product to volume-licence customers in November 2006 and to other businesses and consumers in January 2007.'

So there! The significant thing about Vista, however, is not the shipping date but the fact that it has been an unconscionable time in the making, subject to endless slippages (which have triggered major organisational changes within the company) and - when it eventually ships - will be just a shadow of the system envisaged when it was conceived. And while all this has been going on, Apple has released several major upgrades of its OS X operating system, and the programmers behind Open Source Linux have significant upgrades over the same period.