There's lots of confusion around the various dates of Windows Vista and Office 2007. There are many dates to keep track of and they all mean different things. Here are the ones we're following:

Select and Open price lists: 1 November 2006 for both products. Anyone with SA on either product in effect on 1 Nov 2006 gets the rights to both products.

Release to manufacturing (RTM): Not yet announced for either product.

Availability to volume license customers: At least a week, but perhaps longer, after RTM.

Broad availability: Said to be 30 January 2007 for Windows Vista, this is when the product can be purchased by consumers and shipped preloaded by OEMs. Office likely similar.

Business Launch Event: 30 November 2006 for both products.

Consumer Launch Event: Will be another joint event, in 2007, but not yet scheduled.

What does all this mean? Although it's possible that RTM will be in December, after the business launch event, that's not likely because both are on price lists as of yesterday. It's more likely that RTM will be some time this month. Could it still slip? Sure. But at this point, that's certainly less likely.

What about Gartner's prediction that Vista would be late? In April, we published research saying that Windows Vista would not be broadly available until nine to 12 months after the release of Beta 2. Beta 2 was released in late May, a little earlier than we expected at that point, which means we would have expected broad availability in late February – late April. For all the press on the topic, it appears that Microsoft will beat our prediction by a month (if they meet their 30 Jan. target). We will congratulate Microsoft as they hit their dates.

Microsoft shipping Vista and Office 2007 is great for the company and an important milestone for its customers. We have to be a little cautious in warning people that Microsoft Update helped Microsoft get the products out, probably several months earlier than they would have been able to without it (see Steve Kleynhans's post below). So organizations should continue working with applications, including the forthcoming ACT for Windows and OMPM for Office, although they should expect a stream of fixes for the first few months after availability. Microsoft beat the expectations of many in the industry, so the rest of the ecosystem is still catching up. Make sure your critical vendors will support their products on Vista in the timeframe you need.

We continue to say that waiting for SP1 is a bogus milestone at this point – for two reasons: 1) Most large companies will not be ready to deploy by the time SP1 is available anyway (there is still too much complexity in testing and preparing), and 2) Because of Microsoft Update, you’ll have the fixes to most critical issues well before SP1 ships.