Okay, Microsoft has made it official. Windows 7 launches on October 22. Just in case you're wondering -- and you might, given Microsoft's track record -- they mean 2009. This time, though, it really seems like Microsoft is ready to ship.The situation with Windows 7 is quite a contrast from Vista, which never felt anything close to being ready when Microsoft committed to shipping it in 2006. Lots of beta testers, me included, had an uneasy feeling in mid-2006 when it became clear that Microsoft was going to meet that self-imposed deadline come hell or high water.

If you want an explanation of why Vista was shipped before it was ready, this chart from Ed Bott provides some insight. Ed's spotted Microsoft some time there by calling XP SP2 an OS release, and from the security improvement perspective it certainly deserves that status. Yet from a marketing, technology, and pricing viewpoint the differences between the XP SP2 refresh and the Vista release were huge. There are some changes that Microsoft always saves for a new OS, and those changes were starting to stack up because Vista wasn't shipping.

But why wasn't Vista shipping? Normally the work on a next version of Windows starts as soon as Microsoft ships the current one, and sometimes even sooner. That didn't happen in the case of Vista. There has been plenty of discussion of the late-2004 Longhorn "reset" that ended up with Microsoft scuttling much of their previous work and starting over. That put the company behind schedule.

XP SP2 was a band-aid that patched the most serious security weaknesses in XP, but it wasn't the OS release that Microsoft needed. So, Microsoft rushed Vista out the door before it was ready. Hardware vendors weren't ready. Software vendors weren't ready. Users weren't ready. Businesses weren't ready. By 2008 most of Vista's problems had been ironed out, but its reputation was already toast.

Windows XP owes much of its success to Windows 2000, which provided a stable platform for Microsoft to build its first 32-bit consumer OS. In the same way, Windows 7 owes a lot to Vista. Important features such as the driver model have (thankfully) not changed since Vista, so there's no need to wait for third-party vendors to go through that learning curve again. Yet there are many nice improvements that make Windows 7 feel faster and look nicer than Vista. Windows 7 is ready, but most importantly I think we're ready for it this time.