Microsoft officially gives up on Vista

Microsoft is giving up on Windows Vista:

"If you’re just starting your testing of Vista, with the [Windows 7] Release Candidate and the quality of that offering, I would switch over and do your testing on the [Windows 7] Release Candidate, and use that going forward," Bill Veghte, Microsoft’s senior vice president for Windows business, said in a keynote speech earlier this week.

But was this week’s advice by Microsoft’s Veghte a red-letter day, the implicit admission that Vista was a failure in the enterprise? "Oh, I think they admitted that a while ago," Silver said, pointing to comments by CEO Steve Ballmer last October during a Gartner symposium refereed by Silver and fellow analyst Neil MacDonald.

"If people want to wait [for Windows 7], they certainly can," Ballmer said then. Earlier in a question-and-answer, Ballmer had said Windows 7 was simply "Vista, a lot better."

"They’ve been coming to terms with Vista’s [failure] long before this," Silver said today.

In the history of software, has anything ever bombed this badly?