Insider blogging: Microsoft Vista previewed, but synchronization dies

If you're into Microsoft, your fate lives or dies on the success of Vista, the company's highly anticipated next-generation operating system. Late yesterday, Microsoft opened the gates to its beta test (with the friendly "Customer Preview Program" title dreamed up by the marketing folks, no doubt) beyond the limited, invite-only testing that had been in process for months. Despite the friendliness of the moniker and the millions of testers Microsoft wants, the company says the software is more appropriate for advanced users, the geeks, the hard-core gamers, the IT pros.

Perhaps the company meant to quiet some of the less happy news: some of its features are going the way of the PDF support. Namely, PC-to-PC synchronization. Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch makes a rather big deal of it, and while she doesn't opine on the exclusion, it seems that she's a bit miffed -- it's a really long article for a relatively minor feature in the scheme of the ginormous project. She quotes a Microsoft spokesperson who claims that the feature was dropped in the interest of "quality." Why is it that such a huge corporation with a cast of thousands of developers can't get quality in synchronization? Maybe Gartner was right about the slippage of the delivery date and Microsoft chose to drop features to get the product shipped in time. Todd Bishop doesn't seem all that perturbed, although he notes that the feature was "highly touted" in demos.

Bloggers aren't so circumspect. Warner Crocker says that the "geeks" will be "bitching and moaning" as they hack a way to sync their Ultra-Mobile PCs and Tablets, and adds that "native syncing really does need to be a part of the OS at some point soon." For Paul Kedrosky? It's one more reason why CEO Steve Ballmer should be fired.