Microsoft delays consumer launch of Windows Vista

The tech sector should open lower today:

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it plans to delay the consumer launch of its much-anticipated Windows Vista until after this year’s holiday shopping season, sending its shares down nearly 3 percent.
The world’s largest software maker pushed back the consumer version of Vista until January 2007 from an earlier target for the second half of 2006 and pledged to ship the next version of its operating system to business customers in November.
Vista is the first major overhaul of Windows since Microsoft rolled out Windows XP nearly five years ago.
Microsoft had originally been expected to release Windows Longhorn, now Vista, in 2005. The company scaled back its ambitions and pushed it out to 2006 before this latest delay.
The eight- to 10-week delay, according to estimates by research firm Gartner Inc., may reverberate throughout the technology industry from PC manufacturers to chip makers and down the supply chain, analysts and investors said.
“It is a critical eight- to 10-weeks for retailing and for the producers. The retailers and PC hardware manufacturers work on razor-thin margins, so the impact there could be pretty severe,” said David Smith, analyst at Gartner.

Posted by on March 22nd, 2006 at 6:38 am


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