Redmond (WA) - It remains one of the more bewildering explanations for a major consumer product delay ever given: that some retailers and some manufacturers argued Windows Vista would be too difficult for them to promote and sell during the Christmas season, if it were launched in November rather than October. While few could possibly believe that Microsoft would have fabricated such an excuse out of thin air, the notion that businesses that depend on a company to release a product so that they can sell their own products at Christmastime, would petition that company to delay its release for logistical reasons, remains perplexing.

"I think that [Microsoft] has just successfully stopped PC sales until January," remarked Michael Cherry, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, who attended co-president Jim Allchin's analyst's conference on Tuesday, and who heard his historic explanation first-hand.

And yet that explanation may very well be true. As the dust settles, three leading industry analysts with whom TG Daily spoke at length, including Cherry, have started piecing together a plausible scenario for how the companies that collectively comprise the Windows Vista sales force, believed they could save Christmas by effectively canceling it, at least in terms of revenue - which is the meaning of the whole holiday, from a retailer's perspective.

"I actually think there was some truth to it," Cherry stated. "The reason...is that primarily the OEMs, but the retailers as well, have a cutoff line that's pretty early in the year, [after which] they have to be ready for that selling season. And they did not want to be in a situation where they had to have a contingency plan in case Vista wasn't available. It's very hard for them, in that part of the year, to change horses in mid-stream. If you're an OEM or a retailer, you need to go into that season saying, 'Here's the best offer that I have.'"

Cherry's theory is that Microsoft's partners didn't want to enter the holiday season without a contingency plan. If Microsoft could delay Vista this late in the game from late September to November - which is what it had planned to do originally, and what it is doing for high-volume business editions of Vista - then it could conceivably do so again. So rather than take the hit and be caught off-guard, partners might rather take the hit and be ready for it...It's not a very endearing explanation for these partners, granted, but it's plausible.

Carmi Levy, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research, sees a similar logistical "perfect storm." Microsoft had always promised it would only ship Vista when the product was absolutely ready for prime time, Levy pointed out, and now Microsoft is keeping that promise. So the trigger for the delay, he believes, "has to do with the added complexity of releasing an operating system into the consumer space. There are lead times when you need to release the operating system to manufacturers, so they can then integrate it with their new hardware. And compared to past operating system revisions and upgrades, this is not just an incremental growth of functionality or hardware requirements over XP; it's a fairly significant growth. As a result, the manufacturers want to make sure they are ready to take Vista and integrate it with their upgraded hardware, and get it out into the market without creating a post-sales support nightmare."

It may seem, at first, a little altruistic that Microsoft might want to spare consumers the discomfort of phoning technical support while there's still trim on the tree and turkey in the oven. But there are more financial considerations to take account of here: Free technical support, especially to millions of potentially irate consumers, is expensive. "Even if everybody wants to book the revenue before 2006," remarked Levy, "I think the potential risk of having a support debacle during the Christmas season probably outweighs the one or two points that you might make by booking that revenue before year-end. Better to push it into 2007 and be absolutely ready, and be sure that you have the resources on hand to manage what essentially is a very significant change to the way you manufacture and distribute and deliver products."

If partners were largely to blame for pushing Vista out past Christmas, and not some unyielding, underlying technical issue as some have suspected, then logistics is playing a significant factor. "Just like launching a rocket," Levy said, "launching an operating system is an incredibly complex undertaking. And as a result, as you get closer to 'T-minus 10,' the intended liftoff time, you are going to run into some variables or instances that you could not have foreseen, and you will very likely need to delay."

Microsoft's Jim Allchin attempted to explain that to analysts on Tuesday. "This is a blockbuster release," Allchin said. "It takes a lot of time to do the appropriate qualifications, and also some of the manufacturers have their systems built off-shore. Those come by things like boats. So there's logistics that has to take place here."

So we blame the boats? "A lot of these things, I think we need to recognize, might very well be outside of Microsoft's control," remarked Carmi Levy, referring to boats and other logistical matters. "Microsoft isn't doing this on its own; Microsoft is in the middle of a very complex ecosystem of partners who are all working together to get this product into the market. So even if Microsoft's end of the deal was held up, and even if Microsoft was able to hit all of its markers, and check off all of its schedule requirements, it's not to say that a partner wouldn't have thrown a wrench into the works and thrown them off the critical path."

Gordon Haff, senior analyst with Illuminata, has also been a co-developer of operating systems himself, and has been party to many a meeting where executives have decided that dates must slip. Although he can sympathize with Microsoft's decision, he believes the reasons for it may be more internal than external. Normally when you're developing something as complex an an operating system, it's more than likely that an issue could crop up which could evolve into a "show stopper." "But given that we are in March," Haff remarked, "it seems to me unlikely that a single known technical issue would be causing a delay nine months ahead. Rather, looking at the program collectively - number of bug reports, number of bug fixes, feature completeness - Microsoft decided, 'You can't get thar from har.'

"This probably did not come out of the blue, but I think the product managers been looking at those trend lines and [thinking] it's going to be tight, but if they get the gold masters in time for holiday sales, [it could work]," added Haff. But then comes discussions with the OEMs, plus an evaluation of the "weekly rollups" - collective builds of the OS thus far - all of which could have weighted down those trend lines. Just by looking at the weights on those lines, he said, product managers could conclude, "'Things aren't going the right direction. There's just no way we can make those dates at this point, based on what we know of the past development projects, based on what the current trend lines look like.'"

"I don't think this is a decision that Microsoft wanted to make. This is a decision that Microsoft had to make," said Info-Tech's Carmi Levy. "When a company is looking at the critical year-end period when there's this huge bubble of revenue to be made, and investors are watching the company's performance during that period very closely, no company in its right mind is going to willingly or lightly push revenue off into the next year, because they are going to get beat up on the market. If you see what's been happening since that announcement, that's exactly what's happened to Microsoft. It's getting pillaged. What I'd like to think is that the majority of their ecosystem, of their partners, were in fact ready to deliver it, but it could've been something as simple as one or two partners who were just large enough to give Microsoft cold feet, and prompt the company to call off the whole works.