Windows Vista will not now be released to consumers until January 2007, along with Office 2007, which appears to be having the same spasms of developmental longevity. So what is the truth about the 60-percent rewrite proposition that’s been buzzing the Internet all weekend?

Phil Sim gives us the lowdown on David Richards, the originator of the story in Smarthouse, the magazine he owns.

Robert Cringely of PBS gives us a dark glimpse of Redmond office politics and psychology. If any of it is true, it’s no wonder they’ve got problems.

The real crunch here, we believe, is that with Jim Allchin in the retirement anteroom, and Gates already in Elder Statesman mode, there’s no single coherent technical voice driving the core of the project. They simply can’t make up their minds about the central issues.

A whirl of charge and counter-charge, rumor and innuendo, the usual shifting sands of a large project under pressure, are knocking the operation off-track time and again.

But let’s be clear, January 2007 is only the CES presentation and the release to OEMs (equipment manufacturers). It’ll take some months for the actual preinstalled boxes to make it to the high street. That probably means April/May 2007 at best.

And have you noticed that System Pack 3 for Windows XP has been promised for Christmas 2006? Had they anticipated this delay when that was announced? But we mustn’t add to the speculation.

And what of IE7 for XP? We’re going to need that now.