Last night, during my dinner with Jim Allchin, we discussed the reasoning for delaying the consumer launch of Vista until January.  Up until now, conventional wisdom would say that this is a bad move – missing the precious holiday season sales.  In fact, Microsoft has been slammed by most tech journalists about the delay.  Of course, there’s always more to the story – and Jim let us know it.

Most PC manufacturers don’t make their PCs in the US.  In fact, most manufactures import their PCs from overseas, and they aren’t flown in to the US, but brought over by boat.  As you could imagine, importing PCs over to the US by boat is a slow process, and these PCs end up taking months to arrive after their order.  If Vista was released right before the holiday season, most PCs in stores would still have XP.  In fact, only very few computer companies would actually have the ability to deliver Vista during the holiday season.  Imagine walking into Best Buy, and seeing three PCs with Vista, and thirty running XP.  Which would you buy?  In fact, most of these manufacturers breathed a huge sigh of relief when Microsoft announced the delay, and some has been quietly thanking Microsoft. 

Jim did tell us, that any machine shipping with the Windows Vista Capable logo will have full driver support in Vista – in fact, it’s a Microsoft requirement.  This isn’t going to be one of those ME -> XP upgrade disasters that happened prior to the XP launch.