Jimmy Daniels of RealTechNews writes:

Looks like Windows Vista will not be debuting this November, and it looks like Microsoft is going to miss ANOTHER Christmas season to push its products, if you ask Gartner Inc. As noted here before, the consumer version has already been delayed until next year; now gartner believes Microsoft will delay it for volume license customers as well.

The research note, released to clients on Monday, said the new Windows Vista operating system is too complex to be able to meet Microsoft’s targeted November release for volume license customers and January launch for retail consumers.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company disagreed with the Gartner report and it was still on track to meet its launch dates.

Gartner targets a Windows Vista release in the April-June quarter of 2007, nine to 12 months after Microsoft conducts a second major test, or “beta,” release for Vista during the current quarter.

“Microsoft still wants to get it out as soon as possible, but slipping from January to March is nowhere near as bad as slipping from shipping before the holidays to after the holidays,” a group of Gartner analysts wrote in the report.

Gartner said Windows XP took five months to go from a second test release to the start of production, but the magnitude of technological improvement in Vista is closer to Windows 2000, which took 16 months between the second test and production. [Source: Yahoo!]

We Say: Like I said before, people aren’t going to load Vista, it’s going to come pre-loaded on systems. There will be a few people who actually buy it off the shelf - people like me who want to test it out - so I don’t see it really hurting the company as people are still going to be buying PCs with Microsoft’s operating system on them.

Have comments? Want to see what others have to say about this story? Join the discussion here!

About RealTechNews
When blogs became “hot,” we looked at the category and found a gap. Tech blogs were furiously covering gadgets and gizmos and new products from Asia, and the mainstream tech sites were diligently doing product reviews and news items, but no one was really sitting in the middle and bringing the best of both worlds to one place. Enter RealTechNews (RTN). Our mission is simple: We aim to bridge the gap between the informal and mostly amateur-run tech blogs and the polished but often slow and advertiser-supported tech portals.