Doug & Megan’s World

Of Cretins and Boneheads

When Vista’s ship date slid this week, the tech press had a field day. And in the feeding frenzy, some of them got carried away and started attributing Vista delays to Office.

I won’t dignify the rumor-makers by name, other than to say that Office’s ship date has not slid. Microsoft’s official statement on the topic is here.

The thing that made this a bit confusing for the cretins who write for tech-news rags is that the OEM release of Office (for bundling on preconfigured computers like those from Dell, Compaq, IBM, Toshiba and others) will be tied to the release of Vista, so that stuff will all ship together in January.

This is happening in part because Microsoft has been beat up by the feds in the past for not being fair enough to all OEMs, and this is the only “fair” way to handle the situation. You see, some OEMs have too many boneheads in top management to be able to deal with an Office release in the fall followed by a Vista release in 2007. So to be fair to these highly paid boneheads, we can’t give Dell and other well-run companies Office 2007 in the fall, because then they’d be able to offer something their mismanaged competitors couldn’t offer. And that just wouldn’t be fair now, would it?

But none of that affects Office’s release schedule. You will be able to put a shrink-wrapped copy of Office under the Christmas tree this year, mark my words.

I’m thinking of getting my Mom a copy of Sharepoint Site Designer for Christmas, actually. Don’t worry, Mom, you’ll love it. And if you don’t, we can just exchange it for Infopath or something. I’ll save the receipt.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 3:58 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.