Michael Cherry Quotations

Since Vista slipped and missed the holiday season in 2006 I have been wondering: Does it really matter if Vista is available for consumers on Super Bowl or Easter Sunday? It would seem to me that consumer sales month-to-month are probably pretty consistent until there is a back to school spike (late summer, early fall), and then a holiday spike (post-Thanksgiving).

On some monitors and graphics cards, the controls become almost impossible to work with.

What I have to contrast it with is Apple. They only have one version of OS X.

I think it is a serious problem for Microsoft, because people start looking for alternatives. Part of the reason Windows is attacked so much is because it is such a large part of the market.

Microsoft is always talking about integrated innovation, ... This doesn't appear to be integrated innovation. We don't seem to have a single story on search.

While they were building a big company, lo and behold, it became a big company. There's a great deal of frustration about how long it takes to make decisions and the amount of time people spend in meetings.

While they were building a big company, lo and behold, it became a big company, ... There's a great deal of frustration about how long it takes to make decisions and the amount of time people spend in meetings.

You end up with a number that's as accurate as an EPA mileage rating 'Your mileage may vary,'

Even Microsoft is saying that these previews might not be as stable as a beta build. Is it worth giving up some stability to look at these features?

At the moment, the best thing will be to wait until you go into a store and see Vista actually running on it. But that's a year away, isn't it?

You need to be able to show people, 'Ah, but you really need this,' ... To do that, you need these third parties to have gotten excited about it and to have gone and built their applications.

Although Microsoft has stated that customers want predictable releases, they have made no effort to make the availability of service packs predictable. Service packs, which are typically loaded with features are totally random events that IT cannot plan for. Because they contain hot fixes and security updates, customers have to roll them out. So I don't anticipate a quick update to Vista.

It's just another release on the road to getting to a fully featured, complete version.

It's just a morale thing. The other names have been kicking around so long. It's much more about trying to keep focused and keep some excitement around where they are going.

It just uses so much of the operating system so well. They didn't try to overbuild.

It's better to get that stake in the ground and start working on it and stabilizing it.

It's very important for Microsoft to win the hearts and minds of the developers.

They could have gambled a lot longer and said, 'Let's just be quiet about it,' but they stood up to the mark.

In general I am not as pessimistic as Gartner, but I am not as optimistic as Microsoft. I am a little concerned about some of the predictions based on the software (builds) we are seeing now?each build is more stable than the previous build?but there is still a long ways to go. If we don't see substantial stability improvements in May when we get Beta 2 then I will be worried.

If people are working together on a project and one person starts the document using Word, then other people need to be able to open it, edit it and send it back. When they send it back, the first person has to be able to open it back up.

I don't know if panic is the right word, but computer users shouldn't take this lightly. You need to be protecting your system from all these kinds of outbreaks.

You can't take the point of view that only ISVs need to test this.