Last Sunday Tom Warren and myself were invited to lunch with Jim Allchin along with a few other bloggers that have been helpful to the Vista program that spanned a good 2 years. This combined with the labs that Microsoft setup for Featured Communities were significant in the development of Windows Vista and we were given a token of recognition to this fact.
We talked briefly about Windows Home Server and asked questions about how it would benefit the home user, there is a lot of work to do in that area and after talking with Jim I feel confident that Home Server will really be something the average joe could and would deploy at home.
On the Vista front, I think Jim was more relieved to finally ship something that delivers half of the original "promises" from PDC 2003. The end result changed dramatically, and in all fairness had to change. The goals set back in 2003 were too high and I think we'll see more of what we saw at the PDC 4 years ago implemented in a Windows release 2 to 3 years from now (I quote Bill Gates here btw on the timescale).
I met Bill Gates at the Vista Partner Pavillion and shook his hand, ironically only a couple of the huge gathering managed to get a hand in other than myself, Tom Warren, Brad Wardell, Marcel Klum, Patrick Husband and Steven Bink. All those present for Neowin (thats 4 if we count Brad) we were standing right next to him which helped! He said that we could expect a new version of Windows in 2 to 3 years, the tone of his voice was quite serious and he cracked a joke about the 6 year gap between XP and Vista.
Presented by Jim Allchin for valuable contribution to the testing and quality of Windows Vista
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