delivi 0 Report post Posted July 16, 2006 MICROSOFT Corp Chairman Bill Gates said the company expects to meet a target of getting its next version of Windows software, known as Vista, on store shelves by January. "The chance that we will hit January for Vista looks to be 80 percent at this point," Gates told Microsoft clients in Cape Town, South Africa yesterday, Bloomberg News reported. "Even though the amount of investment we've put in over the various years is probably 8, 9 billion dollars," the release will be delayed if it isn't functioning optimally, he said. Microsoft on June 29 said it had delayed release of its new Office 2007 word processing, e-mail and spreadsheet program from October until January, meaning it will coincide with the Vista release. "The key thing about any product is not the date we release it, but rather how good is it," Gates said. "We have to get this thing absolutely right." Microsoft software controls almost 95 percent of the world's personal computers. Gates, who plans to step down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft in two years to focus on philanthropy, is in South Africa to visit some of the projects his foundation helps fund. Microsoft will spend more than US$7 billion this year on research and development, up from more than US$6 billion last year, Gates said. This "makes us the biggest spender on R&D in the world," he said. "We are taking on very tough projects, like computer vision, computer speech recognition, better ink recognition. The latest version of Vista actually has very good speech recognition and speech synthesis." Gates said he expects China to overtake the United States as the biggest personal computer market within about three years and to become the world's biggest broadband market within about two years. "The numbers are phenomenal," Gates said. Source: Shanghai Daily Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LParyani 0 Report post Posted July 16, 2006 Finally. It will be really interesting to see the release, because Microsoft is really depending on Vista and have put in a lot to lose. Thanks for the update. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Plenoptic 0 Report post Posted July 16, 2006 Well I'm glad they aren't worried about time and are more worried about the quality of the new versions. I probably won't buy it until I really need to or can afford to because there really isn't a point. I don't think it is as accessible as Windows XP anyway. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Panzer 0 Report post Posted July 17, 2006 I think Vista is going to crash. Most people (just talking about Average Joe) only have 256mb of RAM on their PC, thats the minimum for XP some people have 512. Since Vista is going to require 1gb of RAM at the very least i dont think its going to work very well. XP is fine for me, mind you, i prefer MACS! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
fffanatics 0 Report post Posted July 17, 2006 Alright, we all know that the average person will not invest in Vista until they buy a new pc in a year or two. However, for those who just purchased a new pc or have one that is capable of running vista then we will probably buy vista within a year of its release. Like most windows os, i probably wont buy it until it is around 1 year old so that all the bugs are worked out. Finally, they will make their most money the first year or so off of vendors who will automatically install it on new pcs Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
