I never saw this coming.

Microsoft announced a couple of days ago that they were not going to release Windows Vista in the third or even fourth quarters of this year. As you may remember there was a freeze on features just a couple of weeks ago and I as well as many others were waiting to see the cleaning up of code in Windows Vista. Now that there was a slip in dates it seemed that maybe Microsoft was pulling their old trick of over promising a release date so that Windows Vista would be able to get the over hyped buzz that Microsoft has always relied on.

Now we are seeing rumors and stories coming out of Redmond that are more open than anyone has seen in past releases of either Microsoft Office or earlier versions of Microsoft Windows. Jim Allchin who has been running the Windows group at Microsoft and has overseen many many software releases for Microsoft had already announced that he would be leaving after Vista was released but now it seems that he has been kicked out early, there was a restructuring done at Microsoft today that was really large even for them with the live.com group and Windows groups being lined up and Steven Sinofsky is heading up the group.

Now later today I see that Smarthouse is reporting that a Microsoft insider is saying that up to 60% of the code in Windows Vista is going to have to be rewritten, 60%? This remor can not possibly be right one must hope as there are millions of lines of code in any modern operating system and Microsoft always reuses code form earlier versions of the operating system, ya ya I know, Vista was built from scratch from the ground up. I for one have never believed that this would possibly be true. Why would Microsoft just chuck away this huge archive of good code that they already have just to get rid of the bad code that was already there. I am sure that Vista just like any operating system before it has been audited as it went along and some code passes and some code fails.

Microsoft has fallen behind on a few fronts that they are hoping to catch up on:

Legal issues with Windows Media player in Europe
Firefox taking away market share
No native RSS reader
Lingering security problems
No market penetration with IIS over Apache
An eventual Linux Desktop
Phishing scams that IE is letting though still
Google Desktop Search

And this list is just off the top of my head. Microsoft needs Vista more than consumers really need Vista and that is a real change of attitude that Microsoft has not seen in the past.

In six months is Microsoft going to have to fight off more rumors of their demise on the web again or are we all going to be getting ready for the marketing machine to announce that Microsoft is going to be releasing Web 3.0.

Only time will tell.